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Using Science Fiction to Re-Envision Justice </div>
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Walidah Imarisha </div>
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Michelle Leigh </div>
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<p class="p1">When I tell people I am a prison abolitionist and that I believe in ending all prisons, they often look at me like I rode in on a unicorn sliding down a rainbow. Even people engaged in social movements, people who concede that the current prison system is flawed, voice their critiques but always seem to add, “But it’s all we have.”&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p class="p2">For all of our ability to analyze and critique, the left has become rooted in what <em>is</em>. We often forget to envision what <em>could be</em>. We forget to mine the past for solutions that show us how we can exist in other forms in the future.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p3">That is why I believe our justice movements desperately need science fiction.&nbsp;</p>
<!--break--><!--break--><p>Stay with me on this one. I am the coeditor, along with visionary movement strategist adrienne maree brown, of the anthology <em><a href="http://octaviasbrood.com" target="_blank">Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements</a></em>, which comes out this spring from AK Press. <em>Octavia’s Brood</em>, named in honor of Black feminist sci-fi writer and MacArthur “Genius” grant winner Octavia Butler, is a collection of radical science fiction written by organizers, change makers, and visionaries.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">We started the anthology with the belief that all organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality education; a world free of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heterosexism; we are talking about a world that doesn’t currently exist. But collectively dreaming up one that does means we can begin building it into existence.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Last fall, renowned science fiction writer <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech" target="_blank">Ursula K. Le Guin brought down the house at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony </a>in her eloquent acceptance speech for Medalist for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. “I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society.... We will need writers who can remember freedom.”</p>
<p class="p1">Le Guin went on to say, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”</p>
<p class="p1">This is precisely why we need science fiction: It allows us to imagine possibilities outside of what exists today. The only way we know we can challenge the divine right of kings is by being able to imagine a world where kings no longer rule us—or do not even exist.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Visionary fiction offers social justice movements a process to explore creating those new worlds (although not a solution—that’s where sustained mass community organizing comes in). I came up with the term “visionary fiction” to encompass the fantastical cross-genre creations that help us bring about those new worlds. This term reminds us to be utterly unrealistic in our organizing, because it is only through imagining the so-called impossible that we can begin to concretely build it. When we free our imaginations, we question everything. We recognize none of this is fixed, everything is stardust, and we have the strength to cast it however we will. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/76282-another-world-is-not-only-possible-she-is-on-her" target="_blank">To paraphrase Arundhati Roy,</a> other worlds are not only possible, but are on their way—and we can already hear them breathing. That is why decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive decolonization process of all.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>Exploring Justice</strong></p>
<p class="p3">My coeditor adrienne calls science fiction “an exploring ground,” a laboratory to try new tactics, strategies, and visions without real-world costs. Folks affiliated with <em>Octavia’s Brood</em> have been doing this concretely: the Octavia Butler emergent strategy sessions that adrienne maree brown has facilitated internationally (<em><a href="http://d2oadd98wnjs7n.cloudfront.net/medias/882540/files/20130620110750-OctaviaButlerStrategicReader.pdf?1371751674" target="_blank">The Octavia Butler Strategic Reader</a> </em>is based on that work); collective visionary-justice writing workshops; science fiction and direct organizing–tactics workshops created by contributor Morrigan Phillips.</p>
<p class="p1">Throughout facilitating these processes for organizers to envision new worlds, I’ve seen the theme of criminal justice arise again and again. Prison abolition is perfectly positioned to show the necessity of visionary fiction, because it allows answers to questions such as “What do we have except prisons?”</p>
<p class="p1">Numerous stories in <em>Octavia’s Brood</em> explore the idea of what justice looks like after harm occurs. In Kalamu ya Salaam’s piece, an excerpt from a longer unpublished novel, <em>Manhunters</em>, a female warrior has killed the sister of a community member in an alternative Afrocentric society, and the council convenes to decide what will happen to her. The framework is not one of retribution and punishment, but of healing for the individuals and the entire community.</p>
<p class="p1">In Autumn Brown’s story “Small and Bright,” as punishment for an unforgivable crime, a member of an underground postapocalyptic society is “surfaced”—forced into exile on the barren surface of the devastated Earth. Banishment from a community is something many folks working on community accountability grapple with as a concept.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">adrienne maree brown’s piece “The River,” one of the Detroit-based science fiction pieces she was awarded a Kresge Fellowship to create, explores what justice looks like for crimes the current criminal justice system does not even acknowledge as criminal—gentrification, displacement, economic devastation, generational institutionalized oppression.</p>
<p class="p1">Exploration of justice and prisons did not start with <em>Octavia’s Brood</em>. W.E.B. DuBois explored race, prisons, justice, and redemption in fantastical short stories like “Jesus Christ in Texas” from his 1920 collection <em>Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil</em>.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Octavia Butler, especially her works <em>Parable of the Sower </em>and <em>Parable of the Talents</em>, continued this exploration, as did numerous other works: Ursula K. Le Guin’s <em>The Dispossessed </em>(1974), Marge Piercy’s <em>Woman on the Edge of Time </em>(1975), Starhawk’s <em>The Fifth Sacred Thing </em>(1994), Nalo Hopkinson’s <em>Midnight Robber </em>(2000), and Nnedi Okorafor’s <em>Who Fears Death?</em> (2010). A syllabus of these works can be found in <em><a href="http://www.brownstargirl.org/blog/the-transformative-justice-science-fiction-strategic-reader" target="_blank">The Transformative Justice Science Fiction Reader</a></em>, which was created at the 2012 Allied Media Conference.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">This revolutionary reader explains how visionary fiction centers those who have been marginalized in larger society, especially those who live at the intersections of identities and oppressions. This fundamentally feminist framework is perhaps best epitomized in Butler’s work. The majority of her main characters are women or trans folks of color, and when those characters move to the center of society, we see visionary communities emerge.</p>
<p class="p1">The contributors of <em>Octavia’s Brood</em>, and the visionaries who came before them, demand that we see those who have been marginalized not as victims but as leaders and recognize that their ability to live outside acceptable systems is essential to creating new, just worlds. When we do this, we find not piecemeal reform but total liberation, and science fiction is the only genre that allows us to question, challenge, and re-envision everything all at once.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">We know we are not fighting a single-issue oppression system—we are fighting a white supremacist hetero-patriarchal capitalist system (word up to bell hooks)—so our response must be holistic and all-encompassing. As Audre Lorde said, “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” We must reimagine from the ground up.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">“Hollow,” by Mia Mingus, is a story in <em>Octavia’s Brood</em> that allows us to reimagine disability justice. In a future where the “Perfects” have attempted genocide against folks with disabilities (the “Unperfects”), the Unperfects now live on a moon, where the Perfects imagined they would all die. Instead, the Unperfects have built an entire society that centers their needs, rather than trying to assimilate themselves into systems never intended for them. This story challenges us to move beyond equality, and even justice, and instead think about what liberation and autonomy look like.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s story “Children Who Fly” does this for survivors of trauma and sexual assault and their children. It is their ability to “dissociate” (which many today talk about as a negative side effect of trauma), to leave their bodies and join their healing energies together, that is the only force that can save a devastated world.</p>
<p class="p2"><strong>On the Ground</strong></p>
<p class="p3">These transformational shifts in how we conceive of justice challenge the politics of respectability (really the politics of assimilation). This challenge is viscerally relevant at this moment, as Black youth in Ferguson, Missouri, rebel against bullets and tanks and the system that wields them. We’ve learned that assuming the trappings of a larger, unjust system and integrating into a society rooted in oppression will never protect those who are marginalized and oppressed. It is simply a continuation of the colonial framework and mind-set. This mind-set offers slight reforms to the system—body cameras, diversity training for police, citizens’ review boards—but they are all grafted onto the existing system. This politics of respectability is the main barrier that keeps us from imagining a world without police, without prisons. &nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Inspired by the ongoing organizing and resistance led by Black youth in Ferguson (and spreading out across the globe), I have been dismayed at the response of the white left, which has attempted to dictate the terms of their rebellion, as well as so-called Black leaders, who reinforce the politics of respectability. I started to write a rant, but realized I would rather write the future I want to see, so instead I imagined <em>The 2070 People’s Encylopedia </em>and crafted an entry:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>2070 People’s Encyclopedia&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p class="p5" style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Entry: Ferguson (And Beyond)&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p class="p5" style="padding-left: 30px;">The horrific murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, was the flashpoint for national resistance against ongoing police violence and the devaluation of Black life. Astoundingly, mainstream media referred to these acts of resistance as “riots” instead of as the uprisings and rebellions they were, as did so-called white allies, who attempted to dictate the terms on which Black youth resistance could happen. Luckily, Black youth weren’t having any of it; they also rejected respectability politics and the myth of assimilation. Instead, they joined together with other oppressed peoples internationally in a continuing movement for liberation that fundamentally transformed the entire globe.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">This imagined historical lens links us not only to visionary futures but also to visionary pasts. As Soraya Jean-Louis McElroy, visual scholar and cocreator of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nolawildseeds.org" target="_blank">Wildseeds: The New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective</a>, wrote on Facebook, “Black love and freedom reside beyond the body, Black love and freedom are transtemporal and indestructible. I’m talkin’ about unfettered Black fantastical imagination, you can’t truly love without that. Afrofuturism ain’t new!”&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">My coeditor adrienne and I, as two Black women sci-fi scholars, carry this in our hearts always, because we know that we are living science fiction. We are the dreams of enslaved Black folks, who were told it was “unrealistic” to imagine a day when they were not called property. Those Black people refused to confine their dreams to realism, and instead they dreamed us up. Then they bent reality, reshaped the world, to create us.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">This is part of the reason I carry the title “prison abolitionist” proudly; it ties me to the visionary liberators who abolished slavery. It connects my dreams of liberation with those of my ancestors and lights all of our responsibility and right to dream new futures into being as they did. &nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">In her unfinished manuscript of <em>Parable of the Trickster</em>, the final in the Parable series, Octavia Butler wrote,&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>There’s nothing new<br /></em><em>under the sun<br /></em><em>but there are new suns.</em></p>
<p class="p1">The science fiction—or speculative fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, etc.—we humans create doesn’t appear out of the ether. Whether it’s Hunger Games, Harry Potter, or Star Wars, these fantastical worlds end up exploring issues like war, racism, gender oppression, power, privilege, and injustice. There is nothing new under the sun. But as Butler so deftly tells and shows us in her novels, these new suns offer us infinite new opportunities to re-envision our current world.</p>
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<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><a href="http://www.walidah.com/" target="_blank">Walidah Imarisha</a> </span><span class="s2">is a writer, educator, public scholar, and poet.</span><span class="s3"><em> <a href="http://www.akpress.org/octavia-s-brood.html" target="_blank">Octavia’s Brood</a></em></span><span class="s2"><a href="http://www.akpress.org/octavia-s-brood.html" target="_blank"> comes out from AK Press</a> in March 2015.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><em><span class="s2">This article is titled "Braver New World" in the print issue of </span></em><span class="s2">Bitch</span><em><span class="s2"> no. 66.&nbsp;</span>Listen to Walidah Imarisha and adrienne marie brown speak on social justice and science fiction in <a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/post/popaganda-episode-feminism-and-science-fiction" target="_blank">our Popaganda episode, "Feminism and Science Fiction."</a>&nbsp;And <a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/post/rewriting-the-future-social-justice-and-science-fiction" target="_blank">watch Walidah discuss decolonizing the imagination here.</a>&nbsp;</em></p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/article/rewriting-the-future-prison-abolition-science-fiction#commentsBooksFeatureThu, 12 Feb 2015 04:57:16 +0000Kjerstin Johnson30355 at http://bitchmagazine.orgKnow & Tellhttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/know-tell-trans-women-literary-fiction-nonfiction-writing-publishing
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The literary renaissance of trans women writers </div>
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<p><em>"By morning a family</em><br /><em>of baffled new bodies</em><br /><em>caress one another in the sun</em><br /><em>&amp; each by each,</em><br /><em>we teach ourselves to dream."</em><br /><strong>—Rachel K. Zall, “A Body Wakes </strong><strong>Beneath a Sheet of Lightning”<br /><br /></strong>For transgender women, the tides of each day bring triumph one morning and tragedy the next. Today’s legal victory or affirming media portrayal is chased by tomorrow’s murder or incarceration. But this duality is rarely captured in its full, panoramic spread by a media too interested in pat stories about trans women. For so long, the people who wrote about us were not us. Finally, that is beginning to change.</p>
<p><!--break--><!--break--></p><p>One of the most hopeful currents amid the contradictions is a recent renaissance of trans women’s literature granting voice to both a new generation and new perspectives. Two publishing houses at the forefront are&nbsp;<a href="https://publishbiyuti.org/" target="_blank">Biyuti Publishing</a>, which specializes in the writing of trans women of color (most recently, poet&nbsp;<a href="https://publishbiyuti.org/blog/2014/07/_make-love-to-rage_-by-morgan-robyn-collado-is-now-available-for-purchase/" target="_blank">Morgan Robyn Collado’s searing collection&nbsp;<em>Make Love to Rage</em></a>) and&nbsp;<a href="http://topsidepress.com/" target="_blank">Topside Press</a>, which published&nbsp;<a href="http://topsidepress.com/titles/nevada-2/" target="_blank">Imogen Binnie’s novel&nbsp;<em>Nevada</em></a>&nbsp;and the&nbsp;<a href="http://topsidepress.com/titles/the-collection/" target="_blank">short-fiction anthology&nbsp;<em>The Collection</em></a>, as well as a whole passel of novels that have debuted this past year.</p>
<p>Trans women writing literature is certainly nothing new. Rachel Pollack was writing well-received feminist sci-fi before I was born, and a cottage industry of trans women’s memoirs has stocked shelves for decades now. Yet for their many literary merits, older memoirs, like Jan Morris’s <em>Conundrum</em> or Jennifer Finney Boylan’s <em>She’s Not There</em>, were negotiations with the demands of a cisgender public’s lurid taste for intimate details of transition. Although such memoirs were landmarks that have done much good in the world, their template became the only kind of story trans women were allowed to tell: a transition story with its intimacies packaged into anecdotes shorn of politics and designed to answer puerile questions about our bodies.</p>
<p>It became hard for trans women in particular—often fetishized and metaphorically dismembered in a media that lingers over depictions of breasts, necks, legs, and genitals—to mine our experiences to tell stories that weren’t about transition, or, for that matter, stories that went above and beyond being trans at all.</p>
<p>But that has changed rather dramatically. The current renaissance—and it is very much a rebirth—draws on a different, more insurgent tradition of unapologetic writing. From zines to poetry to literary groups to new publishers to video games to a cavalcade of published short stories and novels, trans women are speaking in a soaring, beautifully dissonant literary chorus as never before.</p>
<p><img src="http://bitchmagazine.org/sites/default/files/imagefield_thumbs/screen_shot_2014-11-20_at_12.21.03_pm.png" alt="A grid of six book covers mentioned in the piece: Make Love to Rage, Nevada, Redefining Realness, I've Got a Time Bomb, He Mele A Hilo, and A Safe Girl to Love." width="605" height="550" /></p>
<p>Casey Plett’s collection of short stories, <em><a href="http://topsidepress.com/titles/a-safe-girl-to-love/" target="_blank">A Safe Girl to Love</a></em>, debuted from Topside Press this past June. Some of these stories evolved from her old column on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, <a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/balls-out-a-column-on-being-transgendered" target="_blank">“Balls Out: A Column on Being Transgendered,”</a> which established a style that both refused submission and spoke with a humble vulnerability. As with many of the new crop of trans women writers, Plett’s vulnerabilities take the shape of close-to-the-bone writing that evokes the tragicomic interiority of trans womanhood—the unpleasant spaces in our own minds where insecurities are driven nail-like into our thoughts by patriarchy.</p>
<p>Her story “How to Stay Friends,” which appears in <em>Safe Girl</em>, is written as advice to trans women trying to maintain a sense of dignity and normality when remaining friends with a cisgender ex whom they’d dated pre-transition. It’s a stark showcase of Plett’s skill in painting suppressed pain with words:</p>
<blockquote><p>Take a sip of your wine. She will smile, then frown, and say, “We’ve gotta teach you about lipstick though.… I know you’ve said before you don’t want to look like a drag queen, but it really is the look you’re giving off right now.” Nod and say, “You’re right, it’s totally fine, thank you for telling me and being honest.” Mean it a little, hate yourself a little, die a little.</p>
<p>If she uses the teaching-a-16-year-old voice again, if she snorts and says, “Sure you want to do this?” If she bitterly says, “Welcome to being a woman!” If she says, “Hon, I know exactly what you’re going through,” swallow and shutter windows in your heart.</p>
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<p>The story is typical of what much narrative fiction in this budding genre is now doing; it reveals the world from our perspective and tells the reader what it is like to be on the other side of that conversation—not bathing in the good intentions of the cis speaker, but in understanding why the road paved by those intentions can feel like perdition to so many of us. In the process, with an origami-like transformation, Plett reveals the reality behind the theory of concepts like transmisogyny.</p>
<p>The talents she shares with other luminaries of this new wave of women—Ryka Aoki, Red Durkin, Cat Fitzpatrick, Lovemme Corazón, Sybil Lamb, Trish Salah, and a legion of others—include what may be a fiction writer’s most important ability: making the familiar strange. The themes of much of this new wave of fiction are dark and occasionally depressing—the terrain of trans women’s lives does not lend itself to naive hope—but they also refuse the easy tragedy beloved of so many pseudosympathetic and ciscentric narratives. The trans women in the stories and poetry put forward by many of these authors are alive; they are staggered by the Stygian flood of transphobia but still find joy, love, laughter, sex, and deep wells of human flourishing amid the gloom. Sometimes the gloom consumes them, and we learn to embrace lives of marrow-deep pain that do not lend themselves to cheerful “it gets better” narratives; we embrace their humanity. This sounds like most good literature, and, indeed, that is the point: Trans women can now write such literature about our experiences.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>"As I take another pill, get another day older,<br />and all I've managed is to live a little longer in a world<br />I can't find a place in:<br />That I might be more than a pill or a syringe,<br />or memories or scars.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p><em>That I was made in the image<br />of someone who said her body was okay as it is,<br />but stays up at night wondering<br />what it would be like to carry a child."<br /></em><strong>—Ryka Aoki, “Deal With the Devil”&nbsp;<br /></strong></p>
<p>Perhaps the most visible signs of this sea change can be found in bestsellers like&nbsp;<a href="http://janetmock.com/books/" target="_blank">Janet Mock’s memoir&nbsp;<em>Redefining Realness</em></a>&nbsp;or Binnie’s novel&nbsp;<em>Nevada</em>, a dark cross-country adventure that’s proven to be a hit with the queer community and beyond.</p>
<p>Although <em>Redefining Realness</em> follows the structure of earlier trans memoirs, it transcends their tropes time and again with an unapologetically political voice that weaves the lanyards of race, class, sex work, and gender together into one story.&nbsp;Unlike past writers, Mock puts politics front and center, shattering the genre’s apolitical confines and refusing the stultifying individualism that tends to crib many trans women’s stories into hyperfeminized confessionals packaged for daytime talk shows. Mock bares her scars, but never lets the reader forget about the society that put them there. She contextualizes issues like child abuse, rape, and sex work in a cloud of social scientific data and activism that keeps the bond between the personal and the political airtight. (<a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/article/janet-mock-interview" target="_blank">Read our interview with Janet Mock here.</a></p>
<p>Binnie’s <em>Nevada</em> challenges another convention of the classic transition-confessional memoir: the happy ending where, by necessity, all or most conflict is resolved by the time the curtain drops. In past memoirs, the ghosts of transphobia and misogyny (always personified by a few mean individuals whom one either converts or escapes from) had to be dispelled, preferably not long before one got sexual reassignment surgery and the happy denouement commenced.</p>
<p><em>Nevada</em> offers no such comfort, instead treating readers with a dose of reality and a story that weaves in and out of trauma and slapstick. This is, after all, a story about bitter and hopeless mentorship, where a trans woman on a cross-country road trip takes a young person she suspects is trans beneath her ambivalent wing. With anxious ennui, thwarted ambitions, and a glove box full of cocaine, they try to get what they need from each other.</p>
<p>Humor here is of the gallows variety, and yet Nevada sparkles with so much more verve and personality than, say, films like <em>Transamerica</em>—a very different story about a trans woman on a road trip—that gin up their narrative tension with mawkish tropes about transition. The tale Binnie spins of Maria and James, her principal characters, is one spoken in a riotously unchained voice. As if to illustrate this with the maximum irony possible, <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-4802-3242-6" target="_blank">a <em>Publishers Weekly</em> review of <em>Nevada</em></a> lamented in its final sentences that “There’s something immature about Maria and something pat about her thinking. Neither James nor the reader ultimately stands to learn much from spending time in her company.” The critique hit upon a distinguishing feature of this new wave of trans women’s lit: It is not meant to be didactic for the cisgender reader. At least, not in the traditional sense that is implied by imperious questions from speakers who wish to be “educated,” often at the expense of one’s dignity (“Have you had the surgery?,” “How do you have sex?,” etc.).</p>
<p>For a book reviewer to deride <em>Nevada</em> as devoid of lessons feels like a dark joke that Binnie herself would have written. But there were lessons aplenty; what sets <em>Nevada</em> apart is that its lessons were of the kind that seduce you across long bridges into the mist. They are hard lessons: a look at the everyday, common nonsenses of trans women’s existence, what sex is really like, what work is like, what living on a shoestring at the margins means amid mounting healthcare costs, what the relationships between gender-nonconforming people evince about the troubled psyches we must nurse under patriarchy, and what it can mean to be “fucked up.”</p>
<p>What Binnie’s novel gives us, as surely as Mock’s memoir does in its loftier register, is a portrait of the trans woman as human. Not inspiration porn, not a feel-good story of triumph over lone bigots, not lurid medical examinations, but a decidedly human story. For all the differences we have with cisgender people, we share the bonds of humanity that ought to make such stories intelligible, and thankfully many cis people have walked away with a better understanding of who we are from this new bounty of poetry and prose.</p>
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<p><em>"3 distinctive perceptions placed on my person by strangers<br />Wait? is that a boy or a girl?<br />What the fuck is that? son thats a dude<br />Baby? whats that? o, yeah thats one of them things.<br />She told me i was beautiful, that i was worth loving...wow i believed her"<br /></em><strong>—Olympia Perez, “Triceratops”</strong>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>"It’s not beautiful or brave or redemptive. It’s like a light case of mono that never goes away. I don’t want to be brave. I want us to be okay."<br /></em><strong>—Casey Plett, “A Carried Ocean Breeze”</strong></p>
<p><em>&nbsp;"She looked like a battle-weary hardened survivor, and being that meant you decreased in value to almost nuthin’."<br /></em><strong>—Sybil Lamb, “I’ve Got a Time Bomb”<br /><br /></strong>The past 10 years have seen a general surge in trans awareness and trans activism, driven in no small measure by the connections, community, and ferment made by the spread of Internet access and the undying work of trans people of color who have kept the nascent movement on life support since Stonewall and through the aids crisis.</p>
<p>Though it is a recent phenomenon to see so much ground-breaking work published so quickly, much of this writing owes itself to deep and wide historical roots. For decades, we chatted on AIM, networked on LiveJournal, met in bars, and lent ever more of our fire to the long-running insurgent medium of zines. We learned to write from other women who wrote in lightning, iron, and blood. Many of us cut our teeth in role-playing games and multi-user dungeons, while still others had writing collectives (which continue today in the form of groups like Philadelphia’s <a href="http://metropolarity.net/" target="_blank">Metropolarity</a>), and too many others were alone but for the solace found on bookshelves and during late nights on the computer.</p>
<p>This is trans women’s moment in modern literature, and amid the many currents of transgender existence today, it is singular. So much discourse around trans women’s existence has been spun by everyone but us: cisgender male psychologists, cis feminist academics, trans men and queer cis people. All have had their say about our lives and what they supposedly signify to them: protean radicalism, a crypto-conservative conspiracy, a tangle of pathology. But it is very rare that trans women themselves are heard when we speak about who we are and what we mean.</p>
<p>What emerges from all of these works is a clear picture of trans women as human beings, thinkers, and artists, with mastery and control over the kinds of stories they wish to tell. Neither genderfucking superheroines nor the nightmare of queer radicalism, we are, at last, human.</p>
<p>“To me it’s just one arm of a larger birth in trans lady culture that is really starting to come into its own,” said Casey Plett when I asked her about the significance of this new wave, “one I see in the proliferation of various Internet communities, of the Twine game explosion, of the visibility of trans women in the media who are smart and unsolipsistic and speak to stuff that matters.”</p>
<p>To wit: This new literature speaks the truth about violence, both within and outside the queer community, as well as the way racism and classism have inflected the experiences of so many among our number; this emerging canon stands in a long tradition of writing by women who dared to tell the truth about their experiences.</p>
<p>And it spirals ever onward and upward. This renaissance has its roots in online culture, and thus some of it speaks through the media of that culture. Trans women game designers like <a href="http://mkopas.net/" target="_blank">Merritt Kopas</a>, <a href="http://www.mattiebrice.com/" target="_blank">Mattie Brice</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/SLAwrites" target="_blank">Samantha Allen</a>, <a href="http://auntiepixelante.com/" target="_blank">Anna Anthropy</a>, <a href="http://www.lifeinneon.com/" target="_blank">Autumn Nicole Bradley</a>, and <a href="http://aliendovecote.com/" target="_blank">Porpentine</a> are part of an online vanguard using digital media to tell new stories through and about trans women—and sometimes about cyborg BDSM, intergalactic llamas, or hugging.</p>
<p>Bradley’s latest project, for instance, is a serialized novel available online called <a href="http://trashmance.com/" target="_blank">Trash Romance</a>, which follows the tale of a grown-up <em>Sailor Moon</em>-esque magical girl and her girlfriend who makes magic with trash. But the novel is not wedded to a portrayal of trans people either—it achieves a synthesis between commentary on trans existence and wider literature, redolent of Trish Salah’s evocative poetry about protest politics or Ryka Aoki’s resonant <em>He Mele A Hilo</em>, which is not ultimately “about” trans people.&nbsp;</p>
<p>This article is an impossible one; it could only ever serve as a light index to an already prodigious body of work that breaches boundaries—such as Lovemme Corazón’s mixed-media memoir&nbsp;<em>Trauma Queen</em>, Sybil Lamb’s&nbsp;<em>I’ve Got a Time Bomb</em>&nbsp;(which she both wrote and illustrated), or the rising tide of performance poetry in searing collections like the anthology&nbsp;<em>You Have Ripped Your Dick Off</em>. Our world is remorseless in its attempts to foist a single story on trans women; if these stories teach anything, in the sense meant by the&nbsp;<em>Publishers Weekly</em>&nbsp;reviewer, it is that we too contain multitudes, and that we too write with authority beyond ourselves.</p>
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<p><strong>Katherine Cross</strong> is a PhD student and sociologist at the CUNY Graduate Center, a transfeminist, and a weekly columnist for Feministing.</p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/article/know-tell-trans-women-literary-fiction-nonfiction-writing-publishing#commentsBooksFri, 21 Nov 2014 23:02:07 +0000Kjerstin Johnson29058 at http://bitchmagazine.orgMass Markethttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/mass-market
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<blockquote><p>“You bitches are lucky to have a health clinic,” one of the girls said. <br />“Hold up, ladies,” Marisol said. “Remember, you are not bitches,” she said. “You are hoes.”<br />The women laughed.<br />“Bitches are dogs,” Marisol said. “But whores are…?”<br />“Professionals who get paid,” they chorused back.<br />“Thank you,” Marisol said. “Show some respect for the trade.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In fact, my forthcoming heist novel prominently features many trades, such as health services, sex work, and thievery. I love a good caper, but part of why I picked the heist genre is that it’s a nontraditional field for women. I was mad that <em>Ocean’s Eleven </em>became <em>Ocean’s Twelve </em>and <em>Thirteen</em>, and could well get to <em>Ocean’s Thirty-Five</em> without a woman expert on the heist team. I was mad that <em>Set It Off </em>ended in so much death. I was mad that Alicia Keys left her lesbian lover for Common in <em>Smokin’ Aces</em>. The heist tale is all about wealth redistribution. Where was the caper with the women of color who win for all the right reasons and get away with it? Clearly, I would have to write it.</p>
<p>After a decade of success as a spoken-word poet and hip hop theater artist, I returned to my first literary love—fiction. But the publishing industry is tough, especially for women of color creating tough female protagonists. I’ve been speaking with <a href="https://independent.academia.edu/SofiaQuintero" target="_blank">Sofia Quintero</a>, the author of several novels and short stories that cross genres, about the industry for more than a year. Under the pen name Black Artemis, she wrote the hip hop novels <em>Explicit Content</em>, <em>Picture Me Rollin’</em>, and <em>Burn</em>. She’s contributed short stories to erotica collections: <em>Juicy Mangos</em> and <em>Iridescence</em>. In the genre known as “chick lit,” Quintero wrote the novel <em>Divas Don’t Yield</em> and contributed novellas to the anthologies<em> Friday Night Chicas </em>and <em>Names I Call My Sister</em>. Her first young-adult novel is called <em>Efrain’s Secret</em>, and her second, <em>Show and Prove</em>, will be published in 2015.</p>
<p>We are two Afro-Latina women, representing both the East and West coasts. Each with working-class roots and Ivy League college educations, we both made the decision to use our writing as a tool for activism as well as entertainment. Perhaps due to our similar backgrounds and commitments, we find ourselves with a similar set of writing goals: to infiltrate the mainstream of “women’s fiction” or “chick/chica lit” with subversive themes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and politics. Listen in:</p>
<p><strong>Sofia Quintero: </strong>First of all, I can’t tell you how excited I am for your book. I already know it’s going to make me say, “Damn, I wish I had written that!” I didn’t start writing as Black Artemis to be the only one using commercial fiction to raise sociopolitical issues from a womanist perspective to a broad readership. On the contrary, I hoped that women of color who craved stories that were both smart and edgy would read my work and be inspired to create their own. I still dream of this wave of socially conscious women-of-color novelists who grew up with hip hop marrying that aesthetic with a consciousness of resistance. I basically wrote the novel that I wanted to read but could rarely find. While I haven’t given up on that, it’s been very challenging. I have to remind myself that what makes it hard is precisely what makes it necessary.</p>
<p><strong>Aya de León:</strong> For me the biggest challenge so far has been breaking into the industry. I had lots of agents tell me how much they loved the book, that I was a talented writer, but they didn’t think they could sell it. One agent explained that it’s much harder to sell “multicultural fiction,” a category that my book would fall into, having a Latina protagonist and an African-American secondary protagonist. I’ll never know for sure, but I suspect that if it had featured a white female sex-worker Robin Hood, stealing from rich, corrupt corporate ceos to fund women’s healthcare, I would have gotten many more offers. But you’re a lot further along than me, with five books out. Can you say a little about how that’s been?</p>
<p><strong>SQ:</strong> Getting published was relatively easy for me. When I wrote my first feminist hip hop novel, <em>Explicit Content</em>, I had several things in my favor: Street lit had exploded, and mainstream publishers were now considering the same gritty stories with black protagonists in the underground economy that they would not have touched previously. Self-published writers like Vickie Stringer and Nikki Turner were proving that there was enough of a readership to make these novels profitable. So you had black women bucking respectability politics and blazing trails that the mainstream industry leaped on once it was [proven to be] profitable.</p>
<p>But my work is more in the vein of Sister Souljah’s <em>The Coldest Winter Ever</em>, a deliberately commercial work that also incorporated sociopolitical commentary—and was a <em>New York Times</em> bestseller. Editors were also looking for Latina authors in general, but especially those writing commercial fiction. They were looking for “the Latina Terry McMillan” because <em>Waiting to Exhale</em> was a major hit. The final thing I had in my favor was a unique voice—even editors who rejected<em> Explicit Content </em>couldn’t deny that I possessed something compelling and distinct.</p>
<p>Perhaps too unique, because I didn’t—and still don’t—fit into people’s narrow ideas of what a Latina is supposed to write. My characters don’t have quinceañeras, live in homes where there’s five generations under one roof, or struggle with fitting in between two cultures. Those are particular tropes that I have no interest in exploiting. My characters are burgeoning feminists, often without even knowing it and having never read any of the canon. They’re resisting patriarchy and all its henchmen—racism, poverty, heteronormativity, respectability politics—in their daily bid for survival, whether they’re emcees attempting to break into the music industry, women in the underground economy who are done with playing Bonnie to some abusive man’s Clyde, or a former sex worker who opens her own bail bond agency.</p>
<p>When a man writes about the urban, working-class male experience, people laud it as authentic, raw, poignant… insert your favorite cliché here. But being a woman writing about that experience from a woman’s point of view—and with a feminist lens to boot— makes me suspect. It was my addressing the sociopolitical context that shaped my characters’ choices that set me apart from others who were writing in the various genres I was melding.&nbsp;I have no doubts that if I were a man of any race writing what I have as Black Artemis, I’d have gotten more traction.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Being able to sustain oneself as a writer is yet another challenge. There’s a misperception that you’re making bank if you’re published by a mainstream house, especially if you’re writing commercial fiction, but that’s not true for most authors. Now add to that being a woman of color, a progressive feminist, and a commercial author who isn’t “writing white.”</p>
<p><strong>AD:</strong> And “writing white” or “talking white” are accusations women of color often face if we’ve been educated outside our communities. But in some ways, learning to code switch can help us navigate the industry. Because I think the commercial-vs.-literary divide in the book industry is all about class dynamics. The two of us are interestingly suited to address these, having inhabited a variety of different class locations.</p>
<p>Certainly, going to an Ivy League school, I was groomed to believe I was supposed to be the next Toni Morrison. In my 20s, I aspired to win a Pulitzer. But over time, I let go of those dreams [in order] to write what I want. Plot-driven genres have always been my favorites. Even the literary fiction I love most has a genre structure—Morrison’s <em>Song of Solomon</em> is plotted like a historical mystery, and Danzy Senna’s <em>Caucasia</em> is structured like a thriller. So when I write, what comes out of me is very action packed. My attempts to be more literary were about thinking I should be someone I’m not. I thought I should be writing to impress the literary-fiction gatekeepers. For years, I tried to infuse my writing with the craft I’d learned over a decade working as a poet. But my freelance editor cut all the intricate and lovely language I’d painstakingly crafted. I hope the novel is vivid and well written, but no longer does it take a page out of the action for a luminous extended metaphor about grief. Instead of poetry, my editor had me reading contemporary erotic romance and other commercial fiction for women. At first, I was horrified by the politics of some of the books, but after I complained to a few hundred of my friends about the sexism, I got over it.</p>
<p>Since then, I’ve gotten excited about mastering tropes of romance, chick lit, and women’s fiction, and learning how to flip and subvert them. Part of my Harvard hangover was believing that the downward mobility of going from an elite college education to writing popular fiction was supposed to feel like failure, or like not living up to my literary potential. But as I’ve redefined literary success in terms of bringing reading pleasure and fun to beleaguered activists and bringing activist messages to readers of mainstream women’s fiction, I stay inspired with the work and I know I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m hoping to write books that appeal to people with a variety of class backgrounds and educational levels, as well as a spectrum of relationships to feminism. If you are only interested in women who are devoted to shopping and on a mission to get married, you aren’t going to like my work. But if you’re interested in women who inhabit the tension between wanting to be powerful and sometimes needing to be vulnerable, you probably will.</p>
<p><strong>SQ:</strong> This is what upset me when <a href="http://www.blogher.com/jennifer-egan-wins-pulitzer-prize-commits-girlongirl-crime" target="_blank">Jennifer Egan took a dig at chick lit when she accepted her Pulitzer in 2011</a>. Now, as a person who also writes chick lit, I get it. Much of the critique of the genre is fair, but here’s the thing: You would be hard-pressed to find a chick-lit novel by a woman of color that didn’t have a feminist undercurrent. When you get past the tropes—the glamorous jobs, the brand-name dropping, the romantic subplot—if an American woman is also addressing race and culture in her novels, that in and of itself is political and probably gendered. I’d be willing to bet that anyone who has griped about chick lit setting back the feminist movement has not read any popular fiction by women of color who refuse to deracialize their characters with the hope of crossing over to white readers.</p>
<p>I definitely agree with you that class may come into play in how your work is received by women of color. But here’s what else I wonder: Will any of the white feminists who claim to be sex positive and pro–sex worker pick up your novel, given that your protagonists are not white? How many white women who go to bat for the feminist potential of chick lit and devour anything by Jennifer Weiner, Sophie Kinsella, or Helen Fielding have actually read Terry McMillan? Have they even heard of Kimberla Lawson Roby or Benilde Little? The mainstream publishing industry places authors of color under tremendous pressure to cross over, but the truth is that if white readers are genuinely antiracist and pride themselves on being well read, they should be crossing over to us, punto final.</p>
<p>And that’s an interesting conundrum. I’m a commercial author whose work has been assigned along with Asha Bandele and Margaret Atwood, and yet very few people in feminist, Latino, or hip hop literature and studies know me. I’m writing, as are you, at a multitude of intersections. But sociopolitical “big concepts” are supposed to be confined to the literary realm, not commercial fiction. I’m Afro-Latina in a marketplace where you’re either black or Latina, and feminist in a medium where feminism is still equated with whiteness.</p>
<p><strong>AD:</strong> Which is the classic challenge for feminists of color. I will say that I really appreciate some of the white women who’ve been calling out the sexism of the literary industry and documenting the underrepresentation of women and the gender double standards.</p>
<p>At the same time, I feel like I’ve learned a lot by being an independent, woman of color artist in poetry, spoken word, and hip hop: You don’t expect to be treated fairly, you hustle and create something irresistible, and you develop the audience for something people didn’t realize they wanted. I hope my fiction can have that same hip hop hustle.</p>
<p><strong>SQ:</strong> Exactly. My agenda is simple: I write for women who love hip hop even when hip hop fails to love them in return. Regardless of the genre in which I write, my intention is to meet readers where they are and take them someplace better. I neither write for the literary elite nor do I dilute my politics for a broad audience. I’m uninterested in creating “positive” images of the Latino community, because when you unpack that word it usually translates to “college educated, middle class, U.S. born” and implies that everything else is “negative.” Rather, I’m interested in creating complex images of people who are misrepresented or rendered invisible in popular culture. My stories are not ethnic tours for non-Latino readers, but if you’re a reader astute enough to recognize that “mainstream” is code for “white” and open-minded enough to reject it, I’m confident that some aspect of my work will resonate with you. All artists know that we evoke the universal through the specific, and that does not exclude the specifics of those deemed “other.” The hybridity and intersections that exist in my work are quite intentional and unapologetic. If that means it takes longer for me to develop a writing career that is sustainable, so be it.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>AD:&nbsp;</strong>Well that’s what’s kind of interesting about this moment in history. I think this is a really interesting time in fiction. In some ways, I’m glad my book didn’t get an agent in 2011. There has been a really big change in the cultural landscape that the book would potentially be born into: 2014 has been a zenith for the wildly successful character Olivia Pope on ABC's show&nbsp;<em>Scandal</em>.&nbsp;<br /><br />In my first conversation with my new literary agent, I mentioned&nbsp;<em>Scandal</em>&nbsp;as the closest to what in publishing is called a&nbsp;“comparable.”&nbsp;My book has many of the same elements: a brilliant, powerful, flawed woman of color at the center with emotional baggage, and a highly sexual, suspenseful, political storyline. I gave her my elevator pitch:&nbsp;“It's like Scandal, except the gladiators are hookers instead of lawyers and the love triangle is with a billionaire and an ex-cop instead of the President.”<br /><br />“Why didn't I think of that?”&nbsp;my agent asked. I think it doesn't yet come to mind because it's so new. The previous generation of writers of color have Terry MacMillan to thank for proving the revenue potential of commercial women's fiction that features African Americans. I am hoping that my generation of writers will be thanking&nbsp;<em>Scandal</em>&nbsp;creator Shonda Rhimes. This is the first time we've seen a woman of color in the center of a political, action-oriented series. Her supreme competence in the world, and her leadership at a national level gets equal airtime with her romantic and personal life. She leads men, white people, and is more sharp and savvy than the white president. This is truly unprecedented in mainstream media.&nbsp;<br /><br />While I hope that this will open the way for me and other women of color writers who put brown women at the center, I do notice some differences that may impact the reception of our work, namely class. Olivia Pope is upper middle class. Her team is mostly attorneys. She moves in the world of the rich, powerful, and famous. Her love triangle is between the president and [spoiler alert] the head of the top secret black ops agency once run by Olivia's father. In&nbsp;<em>Scandal</em>, when Olivia is called a&nbsp;“whore,”&nbsp;it's a vicious slur. In the world of my novel, being a whore is a job. Given the stigma in our society that targets sex workers and the prevalence of storylines that have trafficked women being rescued by&nbsp;“respectable”&nbsp;white middle class folks from the US, it remains to be seen how much of&nbsp;<em>Scandal</em>'s formula for success will translate to a story from the 'hood.</p>
<p><strong>SQ:</strong>&nbsp;And the protagonist of my Black Artemis novel&nbsp;<em>Burn</em>&nbsp;is a former sex worker. Sex work of various kinds appears in my chick lit as well. My novella in the chick lit anthology&nbsp;<em>Names I Call My Sister</em>&nbsp;has a character who finds herself through BDSM and the discussion guide includes a basic FAQ busting the myths about that subculture. I have published erotica as well, and I think it’s vital for Latinas to write about sex—both fiction and nonfiction—to regain control of that narrative as well. Everyone can get off on us but us? Fuck that.</p>
<p><strong>AD:</strong>&nbsp;Right! That’s always the challenge as a woman of color writing about sex. When I couldn’t sell either of my previous projects, I knew I had to write something sexier. My two previous novels-in-progress featured black and Latina women, but didn’t have a lot of sex or sexually titillating material. Women of color are valued for our “sexiness,” from African American women being considered “fast-tailed girls” to “hot Latinas.” I wanted to create women of color characters who were multidimensional. Yes, sexuality could be a small part of their lives, but wasn’t the main thing. White agents really questioned the commercial appeal of those projects. I couldn’t seem to get any traction as far as publication.&nbsp;</p>
<p>When I started this book, I accepted that I was going to have to engage sexuality more directly if I wanted to be published. I have a number of close relationships with people who have been involved in sex work. If I was going to write about women of color who had a fair amount of sex, then I was excited to write about sex work, because it sits at the location of race, class, sexuality and gender.</p>
<p>But I wanted to do it in a way that honored the sex work community. Not only did I consult with friends and family who had been in the industry, but I also asked a long-time Bay Area sex work activist to read my book. She had me change a lot of stuff, and referred me to the NYC sex work community to get the New York info conditions right.&nbsp;The entertainment industry is always willing to include sex worker characters for spice or cannon fodder. I wanted to create strong female characters with depth, complexity, and a range of relationships to the profession.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Because writing with sex as a main theme of my work was new for me, it took a while to work through the feelings that I was compromising to be more commercial. But I’m so satisfied with both the work itself and the process that I can honestly say this: The commercial fiction preoccupation with sex and romance has definitely pushed the exploration of sexuality to the front burner of my literary career. But I stand firmly behind everything my characters and I have to say or express about sex 100%, including the contradictions and complexity. Overall, it was a powerful process, and in it, I found my own authentic voice.<span style="font-size: 10px;">&nbsp;</span></p>
<p><strong>SQ:</strong>&nbsp;And we have to. I know I have to find that authenticity. The place where I say this is who I am as a writer. If I attempt to do anything different, I’d lose my voice and wouldn’t be able to write at all never mind publish, and that’s not an option. That would be toughest of all.</p>
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<p class="p1"><strong>Aya de León</strong> is an author, spoken-word poet, hip hop theater artist, and the director of June Jordan's Poetry for the People program. <strong>Sofia Quintero </strong>is a writer, academic, and founder of the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/FeministLoveProject" target="_blank">Feminist Love Project</a>.&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 10px;"><a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/mass-market-excerpts-aya-deleon-sofia-quintero" target="_blank">Click here to read more about their forthcoming books</a>!&nbsp;</span></p>
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<p><em><a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/issue/63" target="_blank">Read more articles from the Tough issue</a>.</em></p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/article/mass-market#commentsBooksFeatureTue, 13 May 2014 21:14:01 +0000Kjerstin Johnson26025 at http://bitchmagazine.orgHot Under the Bonnethttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/hot-under-the-bonnet-amish-fiction-romance-feminism-critique
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<p><em>illustration by <a href="http://pamwishbow.com/" target="_blank">Pam Wishbow</a></em></p>
<p>I first noticed the books about five years ago in a grocery checkout line&nbsp;in suburban Chicago. Their covers sport bonnet-clad heads on demure-looking young white women posed in calm domestic or pastoral scenes. Perhaps a horse-drawn buggy rolls by in the distance, or a barn is etched on the horizon. Maybe a young man in a wide-brimmed hat stands gazing at the woman in the foreground.</p>
<!--break--><!--break--><p>These book covers suggest romantic plots or perhaps a girl’s coming-of-age story. With titles like <em>The Shunning, A Man of His Word</em>, <em>Lilly’s Wedding Quilt</em>, and <em>The Storekeeper’s Daughter</em>, these novels evoke a distinct cultural identity: the Amish. (Readers are not to be distracted by the non-Amish names of authors, such as Beverly Lewis, Kathleen Fuller, and Kelly Long.)</p>
<p>These books, dubbed “Amish romance novels,” “Amish fiction,” or the more waggish “bonnet rippers,” are just one entry point into the varying images of Amish communities in U.S. popular culture. Today we can watch reality television shows with such names as <em><a href="http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/breaking-amish-la" target="_blank">Breaking Amish</a></em>, <em><a href="http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/amish-mafia" target="_blank">Amish Mafia</a></em>, or the U.K.’s <em><a href="http://www.channel4.com/programmes/amish-worlds-squarest-teenagers" target="_blank">Amish: World’s Squarest Teenagers</a></em>. Vanilla Ice is apparently “going Amish” for a home-renovation show. The tourist industry in “Amish Country” is booming, especially around the presumed Amish homeland of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Those who can’t hail a buggy ride can visit it virtually through websites (some run by publishing houses) such as <a href="http://www.amishliving.com/" target="_blank">AmishLiving.com</a>, or listen to the <a href="http://toginet.com/shows/amishwisdom" target="_blank"><em>Amish Wisdom</em> radio hour</a> for inspiration.</p>
<p>But the Amish romance novel paints its Amish paradise with distinct hues, and the genre has seen a marked surge in the last decade. From 2000 to 2006, fewer than 20 Amish romance novels were published in the United States; from 2007 to 2012, more than 200 were. Beverly Lewis is the unquestioned matriarch of this latest wave of Amish romance novels, with over 17 million sold. Her 1997 book <em><a href="http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/the-shunning-repackaged-edition/243002" target="_blank">The Shunning</a></em> and its sequels broke the levees for the current flood, which shows no signs of stopping.</p>
<p><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5503/12547147544_76baca385e_o.jpg" alt="Three covers of Amish fiction which all feature forlorn, pensive looking young amish women with a golden field in the background." width="606" height="303" /></p>
<p>Although technically “romance novels,” these books stand out in the genre. As much as they overlap in plot structure with more traditional romances, they diverge in sexual tone. In this, the books help readers process their experience of a sexualized culture, and allow them to retreat from that culture temporarily. The characters lead moral lives, wear modest clothing, and abstain from sexual expression unless they’re married. Descriptions of women’s physical attributes—the bedrock on which most romance novels are built—are almost absent, which offers a refreshing lack of body objectification. As one characters says of his fiancée in Lewis’s <em>The Shunning</em>, “Of course, a woman’s beauty was not the main consideration when taking a mate, but when a woman was as pretty as Katie Lapp, the spark was stronger.” Additionally, the text is written without even the suggestion of sex, in keeping with the preferences of the genre’s mostly evangelical Christian readership. On her wedding day, for instance, Katie is embarrassed to have to admit she had not remained “pure,” because she had kissed a boy a few years ago. <em>Fifty Shades of Rumspringa</em>, this is not.</p>
<p>So what lies behind the allure of the Amish among evangelical and mainstream audiences alike? Perhaps it’s that the Amish seem like a convenient vehicle for citizens of a quickly modernizing culture to process their own insecurities and the changes they see around them, especially in terms of technology, gender, sexuality, race, and religion.</p>
<p>In her popular 1989 book <em><a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Plain-Simple-Sue-Bender/?isbn=9780061458729" target="_blank">Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish</a></em>, Sue Bender explains her motivation in a short prologue: “I had an obsession with the Amish. Plain and simple. Objectively it made no sense. I, who worked hard at being special, fell in love with a people who valued being ordinary.” Bender charts an “obsession” shared by many others. She describes the fundamental tension that drives the fascination with the Amish: there’s our fast-paced, fancy, complicated modern world, and there’s seeming simplicity and calm of Plain people’s communal way of life. Into this tension steps the iconic Amishwoman, serving up spiritual sanctuary like so much scrapple. It’s the flip side of the “white savior” phenomenon: Here, travelers seek their own salvation by engaging the exotic Other.</p>
<p>Valerie Weaver-Zercher tackles the intrigue of the Amish fiction in the engaging, fantastically titled book <em><a href="http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9781421408910&amp;qty=1&amp;source=2&amp;viewMode=3&amp;loggedIN=false&amp;JavaScript=y" target="_blank">Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels</a></em>. She explores “virtuous womanhood” and how the novels tap into readers’ “competing notions of womanhood.” Most Amish fiction books maintain traditional gender norms through what Weaver-Zercher identifies as “the three basic installments in the typical Amish protagonist’s life—virginal youth and courtship, complementarian marriage, and willing motherhood.” (Complementarian marriage implies hierarchal, heterosexual unions; a few novels about gay and lesbian Amish characters exist, but the norm is heterosexual.) These stages and values align closely with the ideals of womanhood held by the evangelical Christian reading community.</p>
<p>Like their readers, the mostly female protagonists of these novels live within a patriarchal society, yet they navigate differently within it. Some conform, and some rebel. Beverly Lewis’s protagonist Katie Lapp faces the titular <em>Shunning</em>, risking familial security in pursuit of her own sense of calling to another way of living. Love and duty move these women, but self-determination does, too.</p>
<p>The novels offer sanctuary from rapid changes in both evangelical churches and the wider world, providing readers what <a href="http://users.etown.edu/k/kraybilld/" target="_blank">renowned Amish scholar Donald Kraybill</a> calls an “anchor of stability to comfort people who feel threatened by the change.” For example, in terms of ethnicity, the Amish descend almost exclusively from German and Swiss ancestors, and their numbers expand due to large family size and high retention rates rather than conversion (despite what the novels’ plotlines might have you believe). In many ways, Amish identity does function as an ethnic grouping separate from the “English,” i.e., people living with modern conveniences. English and Amish are not intended as ethnic designations, but still function as markers of insider-outsider status (and drive many a plot line). For readers deemed “English,” this contrast allows them to explore ethnic difference from the status of outsider. At the same time, Amish communities offer the nostalgic image of all-white enclaves, lacking the racial diversity of our wider nation. For certain readers, the illusion of a uniform community offers welcome escape from their own; such illusion requires temporarily ignoring the realities of both worlds.</p>
<p>It seems that some women engage the culture they meet more deeply than others. Novels are often “authentic” enough that some Amish themselves read them. Consumers of the Amish brand, though, are not always as interested in authenticity, as the <a href="http://notquiteamishliving.com/" target="_blank">Not Quite Amish</a> blog reveals. It describes itself as “a community blog for those who love Amish communities, simple living, vintage style, and have a desire to be in growing relationships with friends, family, and God.” As with much of the cross-cultural literature, this description reveals far more about the desires and struggles of the writers and readers of the blog than those of the Amish themselves. One blogger, Amy Lillard, confesses her definitively un-Amish love of glitter:</p>
<blockquote><p>There are so many things about the Amish culture I adore and appreciate.... But how wonderful to have the best of the Amish life and the things we love from the English world. Things like family values and, oh, I don’t know...glitter powder?</p></blockquote>
<p>She seems comfortable cherry-picking lifestyle elements from an ever-expanding array of sources, stitching them together to create a patchwork of the order and meaning she chooses. In this she is a typical postmodern citizen—not quite so Amish at all.</p>
<p>People turn to the Amish because they seem to embody a non-materialistic lifestyle. Yet, as they do so, who is profiting? These questions matter beyond the Amish. The Maasai of eastern Africa noticed that their culture was being “branded” and appropriated by high fashion, athletic companies, and the tourism industry. This year, t<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22617001" target="_blank">hey established the Maasai Intellectual Property Initiative</a> to review and manage how their image is used. The Navajo of North America have done similarly by trademarking their name to avoid it being slapped on knock-off art and hipster garb. Amish would likely avoid this route, due to their chosen cloister from the state, yet the idea that the English continue to profit from the Amish “brand” doesn’t sit right, either.</p>
<p>The cultural co-opting extends to religion, as well. At the same time that they are using the “brand,” Amish romance novelists often write with a particular agenda. Evangelical Christian authors writing for evangelical audiences sometimes present Amish faith as something to be converted away from, as it values community order over the individualistic piety of evangelicals.</p>
<p>This is where Amish-novel popularity gets personal for me. My denomination, the Church of the Brethren, shares historic roots with the Amish; we’re another branch on the tree of Anabaptism. But ours is a branch that chose to live in the modern world, not separate from our neighbors. We differ on clothing, discipline, women’s roles, and communal lifestyle, but we share with the Amish a core belief in pacifism and nonresistance. These nonviolent practices garnered the Amish praise after <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/us/03amish.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">the 2006 massacre in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania,</a> where a gunman shot ten and killed five Amish girls in their one-room schoolhouse. The Amish provided a powerful witness to mainstream America by offering forgiveness to the killer and his family. Yet rarely does this important—and distinctive—pacifism gain even a mention in the popular image of the Amish. In fact, “Weird Al” Yankovic spends a larger time portraying Amish nonresistance in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo74Dn7W_pA" target="_blank">his 1996 Coolio parody, “Amish Paradise,”</a> than most contemporary representations do; most Amish romance novels elide pacifism entirely. “Reality” television goes beyond ignoring Amish pacifism to scripting violent conflict into its narratives, such as the invented “Amish Mafia” of hitmen to enforce church discipline. (Kraybill is unequivocal in his denunciation of such shows: “All that is a fabrication of the producers; there is nothing ‘real’ about it.” It is, to him, “very insulting and abusive of the Amish.”)</p>
<p>But representations of Amish religion matter, with consequences that extend beyond Lancaster County. Popular portrayals emphasize certain values, like virtuous womanhood, which comfort evangelical readers; they obscure other, progressive values, such as pacifism or rejecting nationalism. In this view, Amish come across as almost interchangeable with other patriarchal religious communities, leaving only aesthetics to distinguish them from Latter-Day Saints or Seventh-day Adventists in the popular imagination. Amish needn’t be automatic allies of the religious right, yet oversimplified portrayals box them into a conservative political agenda: The publisher HarperCollins, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire, now owns a 70 percent share of the religious book market, according to Weaver-Zercher—including a sizeable slice of Amish fiction.</p>
<p>The Amish figures of pop culture are creations of outsiders’ imagination. Yet those images function in the real world, revealing more about those doing the imagining than about those imagined. What “Englishers” project onto the Amish reveals our own struggles with consumerism, technology, gender identity, sexuality, race, and body image. Our projections onto this Amish Paradise help us process the world around us. And yet, these imagined beings are no fantasy; the Amish being portrayed are very real people. It may not be as cozy to consider Amish outside the paradise we imagine for them, but if we do so we can learn more about our neighbors here on earth.&nbsp;</p>
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<p>Audrey deCoursey is a writer, pastor, and wedding officiant living in Portland, Oregon.</p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/article/hot-under-the-bonnet-amish-fiction-romance-feminism-critique#commentsBooksFeatureMon, 17 Feb 2014 04:39:40 +0000Kjerstin Johnson25145 at http://bitchmagazine.orgMock & Awehttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/janet-mock-interview
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Janet Mock on truth-telling, community building, and writing the story she had been waiting for her whole life. </div>
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<p>Mainstream media does a pretty horrendous job of telling the stories of trans people, often focusing on the details of their transition and running “before” pictures. Janet Mock had a similar experience when she came out as trans in <a href="http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/born-male" target="_blank">a May 2011 feature in <em>Marie Claire</em> called “I Was Born a Boy.”</a></p>
<!--break--><!--break--><p>At the time, she was 27, living in New York City, and working as a People.com staff editor. Only a handful of trusted friends knew she was trans, and not a single one knew of her life back in her native Honolulu, where Mock engaged in sex work while putting herself through college at a time when her family struggled with poverty, homelessness, and addiction.</p>
<p>In the years since the article, Mock has connected thousands of trans women with <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23girlslikeus&amp;src=hash" target="_blank">her Twitter hashtag #GirlsLikeUs</a> and has become one of the most prominent trans women of color, featured in glossy magazines while also sharing deeply personal writing on her blog, sparking long-overdue conversations about the many ways trans women are demeaned and stigmatized.</p>
<p>When a 21-year-old trans woman of color named Islan Nettles was beaten to death in her Harlem neighborhood, Mock attended the vigil—one where Nettles was repeatedly misgendered and members of her community were told to leave their “politics” at the door. In response, <a href="http://janetmock.com/2013/08/28/islan-nettles-vigil-trans-women-of-color/" target="_blank">Mock wrote “A Letter To My Sisters Who Showed Up for Islan Nettles &amp; Ourselves at the Vigil,”</a> writing, “This is more than semantics, more than a family issue, this is our lives. We all know Islan was beaten to death because she fought hard to be Islan, to be <em>she</em>, to be <em>her</em>.” Just one month later, the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP) would declare the deaths of transgender women of color a “state of emergency.”</p>
<p>In another powerful post, <a href="http://janetmock.com/2013/09/12/men-who-date-attracted-to-trans-women-stigma/" target="_blank">Mock addressed the September 2013 “scandal” surrounding hip hop DJ Mister Cee</a>, who resigned from his job at New York City radio station Hot 97 after a recording of him with a trans sex worker was made public. Mister Cee adamantly defended his heterosexuality and openly expressed shame because of his desire for trans women. In response, Mock wrote, “We, as a society, have not created a space for men to openly express their desire to be with trans women. Instead, we shame men who have this desire…this pervasive ideology says that trans women are shameful, that trans women are not worthy of being seen, and that trans women must remain a secret—invisible and disposable.”</p>
<p>It should come as no surprise that <a href="http://janetmock.com/books/" target="_blank">Mock’s new book, <em>Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love &amp; So Much More</em></a>, is a trailblazing memoir, one that Mock intends to use to “rip down” the image of her as a glamorous, curly-haired woman on the red carpet—though that is part of who she is as well. Mock is many things to many people: an advocate, an activist, a role model, though these are titles that make her uncomfortable. What she is above all else, she says, is a writer—and she is one hell of a writer.<br /><br /><em>Redefining Realness</em> details Mock’s life during her most unsteady years: being passed between her parents, being sexually abused, coming to terms with her identity as a trans woman—it’s all written about with astounding honesty and heart.</p>
<p><strong>It’s only been a few years since the <em>Marie Claire</em> article in which you came out as trans was published. But in the book, we learn that the article came about in a less-than-ideal manner: A friend basically broke your confidence by outing you to a mutual journalist friend. Did you have any idea the article would lead to you being one of the most prominent trans women of color? </strong></p>
<p>Reading the <em>Marie Claire</em> article now, it doesn’t feel like it was about me—and it’s because it wasn’t. I held back, I didn’t tell my whole truth, I didn’t write it. In a way I felt like I was giving another writer the biggest story I would ever tell, and that didn’t feel right.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think a bigger spotlight [was put on me] when the <em>Huffington Post</em> reposted <a href="http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/telling-partner-youre-transgender-janet-mock" target="_blank">an xoJane essay I wrote about coming out to my boyfriend</a>. But I have no bad feelings about how the <em>Marie Claire</em> article came about. My friend, the journalist, and I were all part of the very small black-women media world, and if you’re a journalist and you hear that a black girl working for <em>People</em> is secretly trans, you’re going to want to write that story. I wanted the story of a trans woman of color written, I wanted a story out there that I should have been able to read growing up. But weirdly, I didn’t know I’d have to be the one to write it or that it would be my story. &nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Was the attention overwhelming?</strong></p>
<p>I mentally prepared myself, but there’s no way of knowing how these things will play out. I was willing to deal with the attention because my goal was to write my book and get it published. I was writing every day, planning for it, I thought I’d have an offer the following year, and luckily I did. What was interesting was the racial aspect of becoming more recognizable—it’s something I didn’t calculate. I knew there weren’t very many women “like me” in the media, but I didn’t realize what “like me” meant. It wasn’t just about being trans—the “of color” part was important to a lot of people. I wasn’t just a trans woman; I was a trans woman of color. There are more of us out there now, like Laverne Cox and Isis King, but it wasn’t something I thought anything of initially. I was just a black girl living my life.</p>
<p><strong><em><img style="float: left; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;" src="http://janetmock.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/janet-mock-book-cover.jpg" alt="The cover of Janet Mock's book, Redefining Realness. Janet is wearing a salmon colored dress with a cityscape behind her." width="250" />Redefining Realness</em> is groundbreaking, and one of the reasons is that it’s the first memoir of its kind by a trans woman of color. When you were writing it, did you understand the magnitude of what you were doing? </strong></p>
<p>When you’re in the process of writing, you don’t think about the end result, or at least I didn’t. I was just trying to get through it and be as honest as possible. The pressure for me is people misinterpreting [the book] as the universal trans experience. This is one story, one book. I am not speaking for all trans women of color; I’m telling my story. To assume I’m somehow representative of all trans women is unfair. I’ve had access and role models and privileges many trans women of color don’t, but I still struggled, and<em> Redefining Realness</em> is about how I got from there to here. I consciously wanted to rip down any perceptions people had about me. If you read the book, you’ll know I’m not much of a role model. I want the real takeaway to be that if I made it, other trans women of color can make it too.</p>
<p><strong>I did have this glossy perception of you and I’m not sure where it came from, so reading the book and learning about the sexual abuse you experienced, the poverty, the drug abuse in your family, your time as a sex worker—I wasn’t expecting any of it. When writing, how did you decide what stories were yours to tell?</strong><br /><br />It’s something I thought about a lot and, in the end, if something happened that wasn’t directly related to my story, it wasn’t mine to tell. Anything related to my parents was fair game because when you’re growing up, their struggles are your struggles. So I knew I was going to be brutally honest about my parents. My dad wasn’t an issue, but I was worried about how my mom would take it. My life with her was so chaotic; I ended up on the street because I had no supervision. I had to be honest and it was painful—and I asked no permission. When my mom read the book I was afraid she’d be offended, but she told me I could have been tougher on her and that I was too tough on my young self.<br /><br /><strong>But even though things were so messy, it’s clear there was so much love.</strong></p>
<p>Someone who read an early copy of the book told me the same thing. They said, “You wrote your parents with such love.” There was love, but there was also pain and struggle. I think of bell hooks and how she wrote in <em>All About Love</em> that there’s a difference between love and care. My parents told me they loved me all the time, but they also neglected me and hurt me deeply. It’s a lot to unpack. <br /><br />For example, I always remembered my dad as this horrible father who policed my gender and wouldn’t let me be who I was. But he recently told me he thought I was defiant as hell and always spoke back and didn’t care what anyone thought. He says the reason we didn’t get along is because we’re so much alike. It makes us laugh now, the very different ways we see that time, but it wasn’t funny as it was happening.&nbsp; As a trans woman of color growing up in a family with a lot of ongoing issues, we basically didn’t have time to deal with each other’s shit because all of us had so much of our own shit to deal with.</p>
<p><strong>I wanted to talk to you about your activism, including your writing about Islan Nettles and your piece about how society shames men who date trans women, which was spurred by the Mister Cee “scandal.” Do you consider yourself an activist? If so, how did that take shape for you? </strong></p>
<p>From the get-go with the <em>Marie Claire</em> article, I had no interest in being the trans poster child. “Activist” was a term thrown at me a lot. “You’re an activist. You’re an advocate. You have to be because you’re so visible.” I had that in my bio for a little while, but I’ve moved away from it. I don’t identify as an activist—I identify as a writer. I’m interested in truth-telling, in speaking truth to power, in contextualizing experiences. I understand I have a platform and I hope I’m using it to elevate the voices of trans women and women of color. I didn’t want to write that Mister Cee piece. But it was another time trans women of color were being talked about, but not included in the conversation. Mister Cee can go on air and misgender us and talk about us as if we’re someone to be ashamed of, but they’re not going to give us a voice? It’s hard to put yourself out there, to talk about what it means to be a heterosexual trans woman; to talk about desire and stigma. I don’t always want to be the one to talk about these things. It’s taxing.</p>
<p><strong>That reminds me of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OmgqXao1ng" target="_blank">the conversation Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks held at the New School this past November. </a>hooks said she wishes someone else would stand up and write certain things because she doesn’t always want to be the one to do it.</strong></p>
<p>I was in the audience that day and nodding my head so hard. I often wish someone else could put themselves out there. A lot of the time I feel like it’s just Laverne and me, and that can feel very isolating. In the mainstream media, there are only a handful of trans women of color whose names people know, and we’re treated as the go-to trans experts…which is weird because I have a million trans women of color in my life. And with the Mister Cee thing…I couldn’t let that go. Why was it a scandal? It wasn’t because he was with a sex worker. Hip hop doesn’t care about that. It’s because the specific sex worker he was with wasn’t cisgender. That piece was really hard for me to write; it took a lot out of me and it took a long time before I wrote something publicly again.</p>
<p><strong>Do you identify as a feminist?</strong></p>
<p>I feel a similar way about it as I do the term “activist.” I’m okay when it gets attributed to me, but personally I don’t call myself a feminist. There are too many issues with it; the whiteness and the cissexism of it are difficult for me. I grew up poor, I’m a woman of color, I’m trans, I was a sex worker—feminism doesn’t have a great history of how it addresses those intersections. So I stick to “writer”; that’s what I do. That is my contribution.</p>
<p><strong>Do you see anything changing in terms of cis feminists stepping up to include trans issues in their feminism?</strong></p>
<p>It’s hard to say. It’s complicated. There’s a reason why trans women of color have no resources: We’re not seen as women by feminists, so feminists aren’t fighting for us. We’re relegated to an “LGBTQ issue,” but major LGBTQ organizations don’t do anything for the “T”, especially for trans women of color. Through these organizations, you only get resources if you get HIV. Then you get help with housing, with finding a job, with accessing medical care. These systems have been built to tear us down. Feminism and the mainstream LGBTQ movement aren’t here for trans people.</p>
<p><strong>Talk to me about your use of social media, including your creation of #GirlsLikeUs on Twitter. </strong><br /><br />Initially, I just wanted a way to connect with other trans women. I was working with a group of young women whom I would identify as trans, but who didn’t identify as trans themselves. It made sense, when you’re young and poor, you often don’t have access to language. They would tell me, “We’re just girls.” So #GirlsLikeUs is about our lived experiences that link us, it’s what makes it “like us.” It wasn’t done to build a movement, but it has and now I own it to be that. It lives beyond Twitter. I’ve met women and girls who use the hashtag in real life. I made it for all trans women, but because I’m a woman of color many people think it’s just for trans women of color. If a white woman had created it, it wouldn’t have been assumed it was just for white trans women. There are lots of different kinds of trans people and I always want whatever I do, from social media to my book, to be accessible to everyone. I had a professor tell me Redefining Realness was a good “mainstream book” because I explain words like “cisgender.” I took it as a backhanded compliment. I’m writing for every person who tweets me because I’ve seen how powerful it is to hear those who haven’t been heard.</p>
<p><strong>Is the perception of your book as not “academic” something that you thought about?</strong><br /><br />I had a lot of conversations about it. When talking to bell hooks, she expressed concern over the cover of the book. She said it should be taught in universities by academics, but they’ll bypass it because of the cover. Why can’t an attractive, femme woman be on the cover and still have it seen as theory and as an important book? Why is that? I respect the hell out of bell hooks and I’m sure she’s right; I’m sure there are people who will take one look at the cover and discredit the book in academia. There are different levels of privilege at play. Language is a privilege. Access is a privilege. It’s not a comfortable conversation to have when academics use language that the people they’re lecturing about wouldn’t understand. I’ve been around trans women sex workers who don’t know what “femme” or “cis” means. How do we ensure that portions of our communities aren’t left out of conversations about them? There are no easy answers. I’m trying, though. <br /><br />Even with the title of the book, I wanted it to be a nod to my community of trans women of color.</p>
<p><strong>Now that the book is out in the world, how have your interviews with people in the media gone? Mainstream media isn’t really known for its sensitivity surrounding trans issues. </strong></p>
<p>This is my first interview for the book! I don’t have too much fear about doing press, though. What the media says about the book will be very different from what readers take away from it and thankfully I can be picky about who I choose to speak to. I’m not looking to have my face plastered everywhere. I want to elevate the conversation and I’m interested in growing support in communities of color for Redefining Realness. We’re being strategic about who we talk to and work with. If I do find myself in a sticky situation, I’m excited to flip the media around on itself. It’s the review process I’m not looking forward to.</p>
<p><strong>Because you don’t think reviewers will get it?</strong></p>
<p>Because there’s a natural inclination to “other”—it’s something that happens to my communities a lot. It happens when you don’t think you can relate to someone’s story, even though my story is so much more than being trans. I’m worried about the white gaze and people not interacting with the book. I don’t think white people see black characters as human and when there are black characters, they immediately think, “This writing isn’t meant for me.”</p>
<p><strong>Who do you think your reader will be?</strong><br /><br />I’ve thought about that a lot. Obviously, I think many readers will be trans women. I hope my readers are women of color. I want to build the kind of sisterhood with trans women of color that cis women have enjoyed for a long time. If you don’t know a lot of women like you, you contextualize your experience. You can’t see your own oppression, only your own experiences. I know that was true for me. When you’re a 16-year-old trans woman of color just trying to get your next date, you’re not thinking about the bigger picture of what’s happening. I understand that deeply. That was my life. But you’re not alone and you can get out of that life. <br /><br /><strong>Do you think your book would have been helpful to you when you were in your teens?</strong><br /><br />It definitely would have had an impact, but how would I have known it existed? Not all young people have access to the Internet. I think knowing there was a story like that out there would have been inspirational. I hope it makes young trans women feel less alone. I was really lucky in the way that I didn’t feel alone. Growing up in Hawaii, I had tons of trans women around me, though no “successful” trans women—and by that I mean women who weren’t doing sex work. When I’d stand on the streets with them waiting for our next dates, I’d talk about wanting to work at a magazine. They’d roll their eyes and say, “Okay girl, we don’t get to do that.” At the same time, I appreciated their honesty. If they would have said to me, “You don’t have to get in that car…” I would have said, “This isn’t an after-school special, this is my life!”&nbsp; <br /><br /><strong>Tell me about something you’re reading or listening to or watching right now that you really love. </strong></p>
<p>I never get asked this! Pop culture is a big part of <em>Redefining Realness </em>and a big part of my life to this day. I live for Beyoncé and I always will. I’m wondering why there are not more women of color on <em>Saturday Night Live</em>. I’m going to start reading <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Dzqg1TQfK6oC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Unbought+and+Unbossed&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=eY7pUvL-HYPZoAShsoDoBQ&amp;ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=Unbought%20and%20Unbossed&amp;f=false" target="_blank">Shirley Chisholm’s <em>Unbought and Unbossed</em></a> and <a href="http://miamckenzie.net/the-summer-we-got-free/" target="_blank">Mia McKenzie’s <em>The Summer We Got Free</em></a>. I want to read a bunch of women of color writers and name-drop as much as I can during interviews so that I make the most of this platform I’ve been given. It’s my goal to get people to dig for deeper knowledge. I use a lot of quotes in <em>Redefining Realness</em>, and I wasn’t sure which would stay in. The most important to me was the one from Gloria Anzaldúa—“Nobody’s going to save you. No one’s going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. [...] Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.” Everyone I quoted fed me in some way. Including them in my book, and hopefully turning others on to their work, is how I pay them homage. I can talk about pop culture and women of color writers in the same breath, and they’ve held equal importance in my life. We are complicated beings! &nbsp;<br /><br /><strong><a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Redefining-Realness/Janet-Mock/9781476709123" target="_blank"><em>Redefining Realness</em> is available from Atria Books</a>. Follow Janet Mock at <a href="http://janetmock.com/">janetmock.com</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/janetmock" target="_blank">@janetmock</a>. Tina Vasquez is a frequent contributor to <em>Bitch</em>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Photo by <a href="http://www.tredwellphoto.com/">Aaron Tredwell</a>.<br /></strong></p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/article/janet-mock-interview#commentsBooksFeatureinterviewjanet mockRedefining Realnesstrans identityTue, 04 Feb 2014 16:51:09 +0000Kjerstin Johnson25048 at http://bitchmagazine.orgEating Outhttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/eating-out
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Real talk with Meaty&#039;s Samantha Irby </div>
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JJ Keith </div>
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<p>While on her way to get cheeseburgers with a friend, Samantha Irby decided to start a blog, mostly to impress a dude she had just met on the Internet. Since she was at that very moment loosening her belt to accommodate said cheeseburgers, she decided to call her new blog <a href="http://bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Bitches Gotta Eat</a>. Four years later, the blog has&nbsp;outlasted the relationship.</p>
<p>Between her online writing and her performances at literary events all over Chicago—including opening for <a href="http://baratunde.com/#howtobeblack">Baratunde Thurston on his "How to Be Black" tour</a>, performing at the <a href="http://articles.redeyechicago.com/2013-08-06/news/41139677_1_lake-shore-drive-live-lit-ian-belknap" target="_blank">Live Lit on the Lake reading series</a>, and up until last summer cohosting <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Sunday-Night-Sex-Show-Reading-Series/109133642440623" target="_blank">the Sunday Night Sex Show</a>—Irby has amassed a following for her gutsy, visceral, and brash takes on everything from ball sweat to tacos. This fall brought the publication of her first book, <em><a href="http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-literati/2013/09/samanthairbymeatybookreview/" target="_blank">Meaty</a></em>, a Barnes &amp; Noble Discover Great New Writers Award–winning collection of essays that Irby describes as "gross single-person stories." In <em>Meaty</em>, Irby cops to still sucking her thumb, gets into the nitty-gritty of life with Crohn’s disease (like having to describe to her "supermodel hot" GI doctor the consistency of her last stool), and confesses everything from what’s in her fridge right now ("Campari, club soda, orange juice, and High Life") to the fact that she still owns two VHS tapes.</p>
<p>Even while promoting her book, performing, and keeping up her super-popular blog, Irby works full-time at a veterinary hospital. Still, she was kind enough to take a few minutes to answer my questions.&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Which came first: blogging or performing?</strong></p>
<p><strong>&nbsp;</strong>The blog came first, then the performance. I never wanted to perform, but my friend was hosting a live literary series called the Sunday Night Sex Show, and when he asked me to perform, I couldn’t refuse. So I got up in front of a bar full of people and read a piece about this personal trainer I had dated who was obsessed with making women fat. The crowd ate my shame up with a spoon and I haven’t stopped reading my work since. Although, the shit is super stressful and I’m about to take a little break from it because one, book tour, and two, talking about my private parts in front of a live audience gets boring.</p>
<p><strong>In <em>Meaty</em>, you wrote about the experience of taking care of your mother after she was disabled by a car accident when you were 9 until she moved into a nursing home when you were 13.&nbsp;You mentioned some of the specific foods you prepared during the years that you were her caretaker: "ramen noodles, cheap hot dogs, instant coffee, grape Kool-Aid." Do you have a permanent association between that time and those foods? Are there any other foods that you associate with a specific time and place in your life?</strong></p>
<p><strong>&nbsp;</strong>My first year of college, my roommate and I drank nothing but Tang and imitation cola from the Walmart in DeKalb, Illinois. And we used to stockpile ice cream sandwiches from the cafeteria. I ate so many that I haven’t had one since, and that was in 1998. Just looking at an ice cream sandwich reminds me of twin-XL sheets and skipping class to watch <em>The Young and the Restless</em>. The animal hospital where I’ve worked for the past 11 years is across the street from a Thai restaurant, and every time I even smell panang curry I feel like I should be punching a clock. Needless to say, I don’t eat a whole lot of Thai food.</p>
<p><strong>When I read about you eating your "delicious, delicious feelings" as a child, I thought&nbsp;of Caitlin Moran’s observation in&nbsp;<em>How to Be a Woman</em>&nbsp;that "overeating is the addiction of choice of carers" because "it’s a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional." Do you agree with Moran? </strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>I agree, for sure, but I don’t think that’s why I overate then or why I continue to now. Food is soothing, and my drugs of choice are the foods that feel the best. I’m not a potato chip girl, but ice cream, pudding, warm bread? HELL YES. This is not to say that I don’t like vegetables (I roasted some brussels sprouts last night) or meat (and made a pork loin to go with them), but those I eat like a normal person—like, controlled portions eaten with a knife and fork at a sensible hour of the day. But give me a pint of salted-caramel gelato and I am in bed with a spoon and not getting up until it’s finished. It’s such a hard fucking habit to break, using snacks to make myself feel better—even though it sometimes makes me feel worse, like when my thigh teeth eat through the crotch of my jeans. Old habits die super hard. Still figuring out how to kick this one’s ass. We’ll see what I come up with.</p>
<p><strong>How does "putting the intimate details of [your] butthole on the Internets," as you put it, affect your love life?</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>Here’s how it works now: If I meet a person and I am interested in him or her romantically, I try to never mention that I write this dumb thing for as long as humanly possible, which is helped a great deal if homie doesn’t have a Facebook or isn’t tweeting all the goddamned time or doesn’t get all Google-y the minute he finds out my last name. This is one of the many drawbacks of meeting someone on the Internet: With a dozen keystrokes, my blind date has unfettered access to the last four years in the life of my vagina. Some people can handle it. Most of these motherfuckers cannot.</p>
<p><strong><img style="float: left; margin: 10px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wCMki4u69ss/UhNxhb3tdgI/AAAAAAAACUs/-71ZkaUV-UA/s1600/Meaty+Cover+Comp+2.jpg" alt="The cover of Meaty that features a photograph bewildered rooster on the cover." width="300" />Because of your Crohn’s disease, food and poop have elevated positions in your life, ones that you explore in detail on Bitches Gotta Eat and in&nbsp;<em>Meaty</em>. When did you decide to be so frank about all the ramifications of your disease? Is poop the last taboo?</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>I don’t have the luxury of seeing poop as taboo, and not talking about it has never occurred to me. I don’t have a whole lot of shame when it comes to my gnarly bowels, and it’s so weird to me that people are embarrassed about it, considering that it’s something we all do. Every single day. My body doesn’t allow me to be that adorable girl who never poops at her boyfriend’s house. Instead, this meaty precorpse I’ve been burdened with is crapping into a plastic grocery bag behind said boyfriend’s car in the parking lot on our first date, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.</p>
<p><strong>How has having Crohn’s affected your relationship with food?</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>It hasn’t, really. Crohn’s is weird. You basically have to try things and figure out what works for you. Like, I can eat ice cream but not oranges. My disease is stress triggered. I have never had a flare-up from something I’ve eaten, but I have totally ended up in the hospital for weeks at a time due to stress. It’s another reason that I can’t mess around with ill-fated romance—my guts can’t handle it. I haven’t had a flare-up since my last boyfriend. Real talk: Dudes are bad for my health.</p>
<p><strong>Why did you include recipes in <em>Meaty</em>?</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>I included recipes because occasionally I post them on my blog. I do it to make fun of the jerks who chastise me for writing a blog called Bitches Gotta Eat that isn’t about food. Also, people are always asking me what I eat, so now they know.</p>
<p><strong>One of the things you do best is pick on people exactly like me—your typical guilty white Upworthy fan with a bone for Ira Glass—in such a way that I’m like, "Hahahaha,&nbsp;those&nbsp;people!" then laugh so hard that I spill organic hummus on my clogs before realizing that I am basically the butt of the joke. Has any white person ever gotten pissed and been like, "I don’t even like farmers’ markets!" or anything?</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>I don’t really care what white people think.&nbsp;White people don’t have to take white jokes seriously because it’s not personal and it has no aggregate effect. It’s not a microaggression in the same way as a joke about anyone who isn’t white. I’d say lots of people probably get pissed? And those are people who don’t read my blog. But the thing about well-meaning, socially aware white people is that they like to feel like they "get it" or that they, at the very least, want to get it, and they want recognition for that. Making them the butt of the joke does that. One of the big identity crises about being white is that white people never get to feel special or unique, but making them the butt of the joke does that in a generally benign way, especially because I’m a black woman up there telling that joke. I think that because it comes from a place of understanding—I grew up in a progressive white community and have a ton of super-white, kale-eating, feces-composting friends—people are less likely to get bent out of shape about it.</p>
<p><strong>You wrote in <em>Meaty</em> that you’re glad Lena Dunham didn’t write a black character in the first season of <em>Girls</em>&nbsp;"because when you’re black, it’s&nbsp;your reflexive response to monitor black people in white Hollywood, just in case some jagoff writer is trying to slip some casual racism past your ass." You also list several shows with no diversity in their casts that haven’t been criticized for it as widely as <em>Girls</em> has. Why do you think that particular show raises so much ire?</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>Because Lena Dunham is a 27-year-old woman getting to do whatever the hell she wants with big-time HBO money and exposure. Everyone is obsessed with her, and I think what she’s doing is incredible. I think a lot of criticism stems from, one, jealousy, especially since everyone everywhere is so goddamn entitled all the time. People are mad because she’s young and hasn’t paid her dues or whatever, not because her show is unwatchable trash. She didn’t have to spend 20 years working her way up from the mailroom. So what? She is young and female and accomplishing amazing things, so I’m going to get behind that. I would never want to be that bitter asshole sitting around pissed off because some kid succeeded where I haven’t. Good for her. I hope she makes a dozen shows.</p>
<p>And two, people are salty because she has the nerve to be unconventionally attractive and show her real-woman boobs on TV while also pretending to bang super-hot dudes. "The nerve of her to have a belly during prime time!" That is the dream of my life, to have Christian Bale or someone equally handsome spreading open my thighbacks to give it to me dirty. You wouldn’t want to see <em>The Samantha Irby Show</em>. Every episode would be some hot piece of beef holding up my stomach while going down on me for 27 consecutive minutes. Believe that.</p>
<p><strong>I don’t know how to say this any other way:&nbsp;You’re gay now. Can you elaborate?</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>I’ll take love in whatever package it comes. I’ve had girlfriends in the past; I’ve had boyfriends, too. I try not to write nasty things about women, which is why I don’t skulldrag them in my work. Also, my negative experiences with women pale in comparison to the ones I’ve had with dudes. Ladies have just been cooler to me. With the exception of a few Internet crushes I’m nursing, I don’t really want to get naked with anyone at the moment. I don’t want to think about relationships, or getting cheated on, or not being good enough, or not getting it right. Dating makes me feel stressed out and anxious. Mostly I just wish it were socially acceptable for me to settle down with a cheese sandwich.</p>
<p><strong>Do you identify as a fat activist? </strong></p>
<p>I’m a fat person trying to eat food, fuck responsible dudes, keep my eyebrows under control, and make jokes about dumb shit. Activism sounds exhausting, but if I get to be some cult antihero for attempting to do all of these things while also being overweight, I can accept that shit.</p>
<p><strong>Do you identify as a feminist?</strong></p>
<p>Hell yes, grrrl. I’ma need my social, political, and economic rights to be equal to those of men. Forever. But I’m also black, which means I gotta be on the lookout for racism first; then I can focus on sexism. Being a brown woman in this current sociopolitical climate is a hard goddamn job. That shit is why I can’t be a fat activist: because I’m too busy defending blackness and my vagina.</p>
<p><strong>In&nbsp;<em>Meaty</em>,&nbsp;you wrote that your favorite foods are brunch and tacos. Important, hard-hitting question: What about chilaquiles? Are they a great brunch food or the greatest brunch food? </strong></p>
<p><strong></strong>GREATEST. But not every place does good chilaquiles. I once went to a place that served it with soggy tortillas and I was like, no ma’am. This business needs to be crunchy. SABROSO. &nbsp;</p>
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<p><strong>JJ Keith</strong>’s writing has been published on <em>The Huffington Post</em>, <em>Salon</em>, The Rumpus, Babble, xoJane, the Hairpin, and other websites. She blogs at <a href="jjkeith.net" target="_blank">jjkeith.net</a>, and her first book will be released in fall 2014 from Skyhorse Publishing.</p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/article/eating-out#commentsBooksInternet cultureColumnWed, 13 Nov 2013 21:16:14 +0000Kjerstin Johnson24595 at http://bitchmagazine.orgIt Was a Dark and Snowy Nighthttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/nordic-noir-steig-larsson-lisbeth-salander-feminist-analysis-the-killing
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<p><em>Illustration by <a href="http://zesansan.com/">Zejian Shen</a>.</em></p>
<p>Film noir used to be personified by the lone detective in a trench coat, chain smoking in rain-dotted lamplight. But 70 years after <em>The Maltese Falcon</em> ﬂew into Tinseltown, that hero has been replaced. Now, standing in that same lamplight, smacking gum in the same misty glow, is a lone detective in a Faroese sweater. And she's a woman.</p>
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<p>In 1941, film noir became more than a new movement: It became a gender-defining moment in American cinema. For the first time, women onscreen claimed positions of power as sexually aggressive femmes fatales—the yin to the noir detective's yang. And in the past few years, noir has once again taken a progressive look at womankind. Scandinavian crime dramas, collectively known as "Nordic noir," have begun popularizing the hard-boiled woman heroine, imbuing her with characteristics commonly associated with male noir heroes. Starting in 2005 with Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy (adapted for the big screen starting in 2009) and followed by <em>Forbrydelsen</em> (known in the U.S. as <em>The Killing</em>) in 2007, <em>Borgen</em> ("The Castle") in 2010, and <em>Bron</em>/<em>Broen</em> ("The Bridge") in 2011, the traditional rain-soaked sleuth has morphed into a heroine who is as alienated and obsessed as her forefathers.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Though French critic Nino Frank coined the term "film noir" in 1946, it was Paul Schrader's 1972 essay "Notes on Film Noir" that best described the narrative trend of the 1940s and '50s. In it, he wrote that noir is not so much genre based as it is defined "by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood." That mood is an all-encompassing darkness reﬂected in the literal gloom of the dreary weather that forms its backdrop, the embodiment of the corruption and hopelessness dominating its cynical storylines. According to Schrader, the movement was a direct product of post–World War II disillusionment, the desire for realism (after the synthetic glitter that Hollywood used to paint over the dirty '30s), German-expatriate film directors ("masters of chiaroscuro"), and flinty crime writers like Raymond Chandler penning antiheroes with sangfroid.</p>
<p>Though not limited to the crime genre, noir's quintessential figures are the detectives, for whom, according to Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's <em>Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style</em>, "alienation is perhaps the more intrinsic motif of the character and the second key emotion is obsession," and the femmes fatales, described by Schrader as women whose agency is "predicated rather narrowly on their sexual prowess." In <em>The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir</em>, Foster Hirsch wrote that noir reﬂected the changing status of women postwar: "Passed through the noir filter, the 'new woman,' forced by social circumstance and economic necessity to assert herself in ways that her culture had not previously encouraged, emerged on screen as a wicked, scheming creature, sexually potent and deadly to the male."</p>
<p>It took several decades of noir evolution for women to leave the comfort of their bedrooms and strap on guns. The female leads of 1980s neonoir films like <em>Black Widow</em> still operated as femmes fatales, and continued to do so into the '90s with <em>Basic Instinct</em>, <em>The Last Seduction</em>, and<em> To Die For</em>. But then came <em>Fargo</em>.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">In that 1996 film, Joel and Ethan Coen turned Frances McDormand into a female noir heroine even though her character, the pregnant, genial townie Marge Gunderson, was the polar opposite of a hard-living night owl. Two years later, in Steven Soderbergh's <em>Out of Sight</em>, U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco looked a little more like Philip Marlowe (she even engaged in her own version of Bogie-Bacall banter with crook Jack Foley). But despite the obsessive temperament of a noir character, she had none of the self-imposed isolation. Neither did <em>Veronica Mars</em>'s eponymous teen sleuth, who turned up in 2004.</p>
<p>It wasn't until a year later, with the publication of the first book in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy, <em>Men Who Hate Women</em>, a.k.a. <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, that the noir hero experienced a gender recasting.</p>
<p>In the only interview he gave about the series before his premature death in 2004,<a href="http://knopfdoubleday.com/marketing/mediacenter/LarssonInterview102704.pdf"> Larsson told Swedish magazine <em>Svensk Bokhandel</em></a> that he wrote Lisbeth Salander as a grown-up version of children's-book heroine Pippi Longstocking, a fictional 9-year-old redhead with superhuman strength and a penchant for taunting adults. "What would she have been like as an adult? What would she be called? A sociopath?" he said. "I created her as Lisbeth Salander, 25 years old and extremely isolated. She doesn't know anyone, has no social competence."</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Indeed, Salander was one of the first female noir heroines to share all the qualities of a male noir hero, complete with antisocial personality and an obsession with her job. Mikael Blomkvist, the investigative journalist at the center of the Millennium trilogy, speculates that she has Asperger's syndrome, but whether the diagnosis fits is somewhat beside the point. Salander rejects society after repeatedly being abused by a corrupt justice system, and has few friends besides a reclusive hacker and the lesbian lover she only occasionally sees. When she isn't defending her sanity against the doctors who are intent on keeping her institutionalized for maiming her abusive father, she spends her time sleuthing online, keeping herself alive with a steady stream of cigarettes and junk food. Her obsession? Men who hate women.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Where femmes fatales use their sex appeal to manipulate their male counterparts, Salander rejects hers. In the film adaptations of the trilogy, actress Noomi Rapace embodied Salander by camouﬂaging her "female softness," as <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/7262886/Noomi-Rapace-interview-the-worlds-most-seductive-sleuth.html">she called it in an interview with the <em>Telegraph</em> in 2010</a>: "I wanted to be more like a boy in my body," she said, and embarked on a regime of Thai and kick boxing to attain a sinewy physique.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">In a way, Salander transforms into the very men she is fighting against, going so far as to rape her abusive guardian Nils Bjurman with a dildo, mirroring his assault on her, and climbing atop Blomqvist in the middle of the night without his permission. In the end, she fully embraces a traditionally masculine role by saving Blomkvist's life.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Considering Sweden's history, it's little wonder that one of its authors kicked off the Nordic noir heroine movement. In the 1960s, Sweden was generally considered to be the forerunner of the sexual revolution and was particularly concerned with gender equality. Barry Forshaw, the author of<em> Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction</em>, <a title="told the UK Huffington Post in April" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/04/21/the-bridge-headhunters-barry-forshaw_n_1442415.html" target="_blank">told the <em>UK Huffington </em><em>Post</em> in April</a> that heroines like Salander reﬂect the strong women who have come to dominate Swedish society in the aftermath of this revolution.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Larsson, who was born in 1954, wore his interest in sexual liberation on his sleeve. Kurdo Baksi, who wrote <em>Stieg Larsson, My Friend</em>, revealed that the Millennium trilogy's author was particularly concerned with the oppression of women. "[T]he women in his novels have minds of their own and go their own ways," <a title="Baksi wrote in the Daily Mail" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1299216/Stieg-Larsson-wrote-novel-The-Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-fuelled-brutal-rape.html" target="_blank">Baksi wrote in the <em>Daily Mail</em></a>. "They fight. They resist. Just as he wished all women would do in the real world."</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Danish producer Søren Sveistrup was more concerned with women fighting and resisting in the fictional world. When he created <em>Forbrydelsen</em> in 2007, he claimed he was surrounded (onscreen) by "disappointing" female detectives who did little more than flirt with their colleagues. With no women on which to build his heroine Sarah Lund, he turned to a man: Clint Eastwood. "If you watch <em>Dirty Harry</em>, he's not especially likable, and I like that paradox about a character," Sveistrup <a title="told the U.K.'s Independent on Sunday in November 2012" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/an-end-to-the-killing-soren-sveistrup-reveals-why-sarah-lunds-third-series-will-be-her-last-8269643.html" target="_blank">told the U.K.'s <em>Independent on Sunday</em> in November 2012</a>.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Indeed, Lund's messy-haired, Nicorette-chewing single mother launched a thousand knitwear fan sites with her handmade Faroese sweater paired with jeans, flats, and makeup-free face. Danish actress Sofie Gråbøl worked with Sveistrup to create her character, who inevitably gets obsessed with each season-long crime. Gråbøl was the one who suggested the now-famous Gudrun &amp; Gudrun sweater that Lund rarely sheds, a 280-euro top that reportedly flew off the shelves when the show premiered. "It tells of a woman who has so much confidence in herself that she doesn't have to use her sex to get what she wants," she <a title="told the Guardian in 2011" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/mar/13/the-killing-sofie-grabol-sarah-lund-interview" target="_blank">told the <em>Guardian</em> in 2011</a>.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Lund's odd relationships sometimes land her in a familiar noir trap. In <em>Film Noir</em>, Silver and Ward note that the noir hero is often unable to "distinguish between benign and malign as he moves through the complex noir underworld." Lund experiences this blindness numerous times, and even occasionally vacillates between wanting to kiss and to arrest the men in front of her. She also falls prey to what Schrader describes as the noir hero's traditional "loss of honor," when her obsession with the Nanna Birk Larsen case in season one has her ignoring her superiors to embark on a one-woman crusade. At the end of the season, Lund is demoted to the role of passport officer in a small town, though she does return to her old post in season two.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Where Lund was inspired by Clint Eastwood, the rest of Scandinavia was likely inspired by Helen Mirren. According to Nikolaj Arcel (cowriter of the 2009 film adaptation of <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>), the U.K. series <em>Prime Suspect</em>, which aired from 1991 to 2006, is largely responsible for the rise in Nordic noir heroines. In the ITV show, Mirren plays Jane Tennison, a whip-smart detective chief inspector in a mostly male London police department who works incessantly, has no social life, loves her booze, and beds who she wants, when she wants. "That was the mother of all crime series," <a title="Arcel told the Radio Times this year" href="http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-06-15/all-hail-the-danish-revolution-of-sizzling-drama-and-meaty-roles-for-women" target="_blank">Arcel told the <em>Radio Times</em> this year</a>. "There was an inspired character, sexually aggressive and with problems of her own."</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Sofia Helin, who plays Saga Norén in the Swedish/Danish series <em>Bron/Broen</em>, admitted to the&nbsp;<em>Times</em> that Tennison was the only tv detective she ever "got into," though her character ostensibly owes little to her. In the first place, Norén is clearly on the autism spectrum. Though the show never states that she has Asperger's syndrome, <a title="Helin told the Guardian in 2011" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/may/12/bridge-sofia-helin-saga-interview" target="_blank">Helin told the <em>Guardian</em> in 2011</a> that she had read books by people with the disorder in order to understand the homicide detective with zero social graces who discovers a body on the border between Sweden and Denmark. "My brain moves in circles, but Saga thinks squarely," Helin explained in reference to Norén's unsmiling face and her stiff way of walking. <a title="She added to the Daily Mail in April" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2129868/The-Bridge-Icy-blonde-leather-clad--meet-BBCs-new-Scandinavian-crime-sensation.html" target="_blank">She added to the <em>Daily Mail</em> in April</a>, "She is obsessed with order and logic."</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Like Salander, Norén wears leather as her uniform—in her case, brown leather pants that she seems to have chosen for practical purposes ("They're warm and they can take almost everything. I mean rain and snow, you know?" Helin <a title="told the Telegraph" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9275562/The-Bridges-Sofia-Helin-interview.html" target="_blank">told the <em>Telegraph</em></a>). No doubt, Norén also chooses to drive a Porsche because of its size, speed, and efficiency. She is similarly practical when it comes to food and sex. Living alone, she eats packaged meals so that she has more time to spend on the job. As for sex, she simply shops for it at clubs when she feels the urge. Sated, she goes right back to work, sometimes even breaking out crime-scene photos in bed while her lover is still in a postcoital slumber.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Norén's male partner, Danish homicide detective Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia), takes on the traditionally female role of the pair. His symbolic castration is literalized when he gets a vasectomy in season one, all the better for him to serve an almost maternal role for Norén. He explains the social graces she must embrace to function in society, such as praising her staff for good work and not sleeping with his own 20-year-old son. At the end of the first season, Norén maintains her position of dominance by taking a bullet for and saving Rohde. (The duo is set to return in the second season, which airs in late 2013.)</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">One of the only Nordic noir series not to focus on a detective, the Danish show <em>Borgen</em> is still a member of this Scandi family thanks to its somber tone. The nickname of Christiansborg Palace, which houses the Danish prime minister's office, <em>Borgen</em> revolves around the country's fictional first female&nbsp;PM, Birgitte Nyborg Christensen, and the compromises she must make to run the country while raising her family. It is unsurprising that the first overtly political female noir hero came out of Denmark in 2010, when Helle Thorning-Schmidt was climbing the political ladder, eventually becoming the country's first female PM in 2011.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">The leader of the Moderates who finds herself in charge of the country after both Liberal and Labour parties make political missteps, Christensen starts out a staunch idealist but finds herself engaging in manipulation and compromise to realize her goals. She often finds herself in hypocritical situations, firing her unethical spin doctor, Kasper Juul, only to rehire him when she realizes that he is the reason she is in power. She starts finding it harder to attend to her family as well as the country. Her chief characteristic is what James Naremore described in <em>More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts</em> as "psychological and moral disorientation." In a rare moment of candor in season one, Christensen admits that she has "lost her bearings."</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">In an unfamiliar role reversal, Christensen's husband takes on the role of dissatisfied homemaker, even resorting to having an affair when he tires of the scheduled sex dates and public facades necessitated by his wife's position. Ahead of the second season's U.K. premiere (the third season is set to air in spring 2013), star Sidse Babett Knudsen <a title="told the Telegraph" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9042669/Borgen-Sidse-Babett-Knudsen-interview.html" target="_blank">told the <em>Telegraph</em></a> that she fought against the largely male writers' wish to write Birgitte as a guilt-ridden woman: "I don't want her to feel sorry for herself or suddenly become a soppy mess in her private life, because you wouldn't believe her as a prime minister if she did that." Nor would you believe her as a noir hero.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Though <em>Borgen</em> was the only Nordic noir show to appear in the original in the United States (on Link TV), it is set for an American remake, according to the <em>Daily Beast</em>, like the rest of the aforementioned series. The first U.S. adaptation of the Millennium trilogy appeared in 2011 to mixed reviews, with the next two already in the works. Meanwhile, after only two (admittedly overly convoluted) seasons, AMC's <em>The Killing</em> was canceled, but in early 2013 announced it would be revived for a third season. A U.S. version of<em> Bron/Broen</em>, set on the U.S./Mexico border, is currently being produced by FX.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">So what makes Nordic noir so attractive to American audiences? According to a <a title="2010 article in the Economist" href="http://www.economist.com/node/15660846" target="_blank">2010 article in the<em> Economist</em></a>, "Three factors underpin the success of Nordic crime fiction: language, heroes, and setting." Not only is the language simple, the Swedish society is "soft," writer Jo Nesbø told the magazine, a progressive welfare system hiding its dark underbelly. As for the setting, it is cold and unadorned, qualities Nesbø said are not unlike its population, which is "brought up to hide their feelings." <a title="In the Daily Beast" href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/20/forbrydelsen-borgen-the-bridge-the-rise-of-nordic-noir-tv.html" target="_blank">In the <em>Daily Beast</em></a>, <em>Radio Times</em> editor Alison Graham said U.K. viewers have fallen hard for Nordic noir because the complex storylines do not speak down to them. "Major characters are killed off, and there is never any kind of 'redemptive' aspect to the story," she said. "The latter is pretty much a requirement of British tv drama and, I would suggest, American dramas too." Forshaw added in the aforementioned <em>Huffington Post</em> interview that Nordic noir also benefits from not being just about crime but about social issues as well. While <em>Borgen</em> is set in the world of politics, <em>Forbrydelsen</em> also has a parallel political storyline each season; thus, offers Forshaw, "Those crime writers have more to say about society, you get more value."</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Not only that, American television has become more open in the past few years to more powerful heroines in cop shows. Women have been headlining series like <em>The Closer </em>(which was also inspired by <em>Prime Suspect</em>, according to <a title="Kyra Sedgwick in a 2010 interview with NPR" href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128414212" target="_blank">Kyra Sedgwick in a 2010 interview with NPR</a>),<em> Rizzoli and Isles</em>, <em>CSI</em>, <em>Prime Suspect</em>,<em> </em>and<em> Bones</em>, whose titular character, though she is a forensic anthropologist, is as socially awkward as Nordic noir's finest.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent"><em>Homeland</em>'s<em> </em>bipolar CIA officer, Carrie Mathison, has made such a show of social awkwardness that Sofia Helin was told the character "could be a friend of Saga Norén." Though series developer <a title="Howard Gordon told Newsweek" href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/16/we-exploited-the-sexism.html" target="_blank">Howard Gordon told <em>Newsweek</em></a> that they "exploited the sexism" in the CIA by turning Carrie into a woman (the original Israeli drama on which <em>Homeland</em> is based had a male hero), the <a title="L.A. Times posited in a 2011 piece" href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/10/entertainment/la-ca-crime-feminine-20110410" target="_blank"><em>L.A. Times</em> posited in a 2011 piece</a> that, in general, women were starting to dominate cop series because they were the ones writing and producing them. <em>CSI</em> showrunner Carol Mendelsohn added to the <em>Times </em>story that women these days feel they can protect themselves—after growing up watching men solve crimes, they are now the ones who have jobs as detectives and forensic investigators.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">The importance of noir heroines like Lisbeth Salander, Sarah Lund, Saga Norén, and Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is not only to put women on an equal footing with men—we can be just as work obsessed and as socially inept as you—but, more important, to change the traditional view of women as victims. By updating the women in noir from sex objects and victims to protectors—of both women and men—Nordic noir series are setting a precedent for other genres to accept. If the trench coat fits, a hero is a hero regardless of gender.</p>
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<p class="Byline"><strong>Soraya Roberts</strong> is a freelance writer living in Toronto. She is working on her first book, which she hopes to publish later this year.</p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/article/nordic-noir-steig-larsson-lisbeth-salander-feminist-analysis-the-killing#commentsBooksFeatureMon, 11 Feb 2013 23:22:01 +0000Kjerstin Johnson21311 at http://bitchmagazine.orgSugar Rush http://bitchmagazine.org/article/sugar-rush
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<p class="Introparagraphtext">Two years ago, my mother died. She was 48, I was 25. I turned to Sugar in a voracious, all-consuming way. Not sweets—I devoured "Dear Sugar,"&nbsp;an <a href="http://therumpus.net/sections/dear-sugar/">online advice column at the literary website the Rumpus</a>.</p>
<p class="bodytext">I had trouble describing "Dear Sugar" to others, explaining why it was more than an advice column. It wasn't just that Sugar had lost her 45-year-old mother when she was 23, and drew upon the experience frequently in her work. Her writing held something bigger. With grace, kindness, and curse words, Sugar provided clarity on everything from dealing with the death of someone dear to leaving the ones we love. When I read Sugar's column<a href="http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/"> "No. 78: The Obliterated Place"</a> around the one-year anniversary of my mom's death, I came to understand my pain as something primal that I could turn into something beautiful. When I feel dejected about my writing, her words from the column <a href="http://therumpus.net/2010/08/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-48-write-like-a-motherfucker/">"No. 48: Write Like a Motherfucker"</a> ("Write…. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.") echo in my brain like a prayer. When I wonder if things will ever feel okay again, I turn to <a href="http://therumpus.net/2011/02/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-64/">"No. 64: Tiny Beautiful Things"</a> to be reminded that "most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room."</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Because of an unlikely medium—the advice column—so many of us, especially women, are pushing ourselves to love our bodies, trust our guts, and follow our hearts. And we have writer Cheryl Strayed to thank. A lifelong feminist, Strayed inherited—and transformed—the advice column from its original author, Steve Almond. Her thoughtful advice, clear feminist stance, and gift for storytelling has hooked thousands of faithful readers she calls her "sweet peas." Strayed wrote the column anonymously for two years before coming out as Sugar in February 2012. Five short months later, the author has experienced a meteoric rise, going from anonymous, unpaid advice columnist and author to the writer who inspired Oprah Winfrey to bring back her book club for the sole purpose of sharing Strayed's new memoir, <em>Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail</em>.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Strayed's career continues to soar, thanks in part to the countless devoted fans who initially fell in love with the person they knew only as Sugar. <em>Wild</em> is a <em>New York Times</em> bestseller that was recently optioned for a film directed by Lisa Cholodenko and starring Reese Witherspoon. Her advice columns have been compiled into the collection <em>Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar</em>, released in July. Strayed took some time off to promote <em>Wild</em> and other projects, but she's now back to writing "Dear Sugar" and recently took the time to talk to <em>Bitch</em> about how feminism informs her work and why she thinks so many have trusted her with their deepest secrets.</p>
<p class="QAscreenfeature"><strong>The thing about you that everyone really responds to is your honesty and your empathy. When referencing your work as Sugar, the phrase "radical empathy" gets used a lot; it's even in the introduction to <em>Tiny Beautiful Things</em>. Do you think radical empathy aptly describes your work as Sugar?</strong></p>
<p class="bodytext">The phrase does capture what I strive to convey. When I first took over the column I thought, "Who am I to give advice?" I'm not an expert, but I came to the realization that that's the best person to give advice. We don't listen to the know-it-alls. I'm someone who's made mistakes, and people are comforted when I tell them they're going to be okay. I think people feel loved by Sugar, even when I'm saying they're being an asshole. The point is it's okay, because we're all assholes sometimes. The more important question is how you make amends.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">A lot of the letters I respond to are in reference to all the things we're told that turn out not to be true. When someone writes me to say they're tempted to cheat on their spouse, the approach isn't to tell them they're a horrible person. They're just married. It's not shocking to be married for a number of years and want to have sex with someone else; we just don't talk openly about it. I get down in the mud with people and let them know it's okay to be human and flawed.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Sometimes I think the reason I became a writer is because I've always felt others' experiences so acutely. When I tell the people who write me letters that their problems keep me up at night, I'm not joking. I've been given a huge gift with this column, and I knew I would write it like a motherfucker, but I didn't know people would embrace Sugar the way they have. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but the crosscurrent was always that I wanted to help people. I didn't have total faith that I could help people with writing, but as Sugar I feel like I have helped in some small way.</p>
<p class="QAscreenfeature"><strong>When advice columns like Dan Savage's "Savage Love" emerged, they aimed to be a lot edgier than their advice-column predecessors. Even Sugar's original writer, Steve Almond, took a more sarcastic, lighthearted approach. Along with radical empathy, your approach as Sugar includes radical disclosure. Your life experiences become integral to the advice being given, and you make yourself completely vulnerable. Did you consciously try to upset the medium?</strong></p>
<p class="bodytext">There was no master plan. What it turned out to be was just my natural approach. I wasn't an advice-column connoisseur. I'd read Dan Savage's column here and there and I loved his edginess, but I knew it wasn't my style. I hadn't really read any of the other columnists [mentioned] in the tagline Steve used for Sugar [Dear Abby, Cary Tennis, Dan Savage, Miss Manners]. I just stumbled into it. I thought I'd try to be funny like Steve, but my strength is in sincerity. I drew from my life because that's what I do in all of my writing. Initially, I feared readers might think I was self-absorbed, but people got it. They understood I was telling them about me so I could tell them about themselves.</p>
<p class="QAscreenfeature"><strong>In your writing and in recent interviews, you talk about how you went off to college and became an active feminist. How did your feminism take shape?</strong></p>
<p class="bodytext">I've been a feminist since my earliest memory. When I was a kid in the early '70s I'd listen to the <em>Free to Be You and Me</em> album with Marlo Thomas, which had this fantastic, bleeding-heart, liberal, feminist, antiracist agenda. It was released by the <a href="http://ms.foundation.org/">Ms. Foundation for Women</a> and it addressed issues relating to gender and race and it educated kids about sexism. I was very conscious of these issues from an early age, especially because of my mom, who was a really strong person and a battered wife. Once she left my dad for good, she was a single mom, totally alone and very poor with three kids at the age of 26. She worked in factories, she worked as a waitress, and we were on welfare. I knew I didn't want to replicate my mom's life, but I connected her experiences to feminism. They had everything to do with gender and class, but I just couldn't articulate that at the time. So I was the lone feminist voice at my little high school and then I went to college and met all of these women with similar beliefs and I was blown away.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">As I get older, feminism informs my work in different ways. It's the reason I got involved with starting an organization called <a href="http://www.vidaweb.org/">VIDA: Women in Literary Arts</a>, which seeks to deepen the conversation about gender inequity in the literary world. We did something called "The Count," which found that the more prestigious the journal or the publication, the less women are featured in it. The situation for women writers has improved, but there's still an incredible amount of bias.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">In my 20s, my feminism was righteous and angry; now I carry it more deeply but also more lightly. I no longer feel like I have to make big political statements wherever I go, but I will fight when something's important to me. I made sure that the cover of <em>Wild</em> wasn't gendered. You have to be really intentional about that as a female writer. Things like this come up all the time. While promoting <em>Wild</em> on a radio show, the host said, "This is a great book for women." I had to correct him and say "No, this is a great book for <em>people</em>." I wasn't going to allow myself to be marginalized in that way.</p>
<p class="QAscreenfeature"><strong>When reading "Dear Sugar," I feel like there are some very apparent feminist messages, like in column <a href="http://therumpus.net/2011/09/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-86-tiny-revolutions/">"No. 86: Tiny Revolutions,"</a> which is very much about accepting your body. How much does feminism inform your work as Sugar? &nbsp;</strong></p>
<p class="bodytext">Feminism is who I am; it's the lens from which I view the world. Everything in Sugar is feminist. It should be stamped "This is written by a feminist." Some columns are more explicitly feminist than others—"Tiny Revolutions" is one example. In it, I write about how feminism has completely failed on the beauty front. We're still obsessed with our bodies, still obsessed with how our asses look in our jeans. I'm not exempt from this. I feel the pressure to be pretty too, but for things to really change women need to stand together against the beauty machine. We have to take responsibility for the values we're perpetuating. I don't want to suggest that we all just internalize the issue and blame ourselves, because it's also a cultural problem. I heard something recently about men and women who do online dating: When going on a date with someone they met online, the number-one fear that straight women have is going on a date with a serial killer. The number-one fear straight men have is going on a date with a fat woman. That says everything.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="QAscreenfeature"><strong>An excerpt from <em>Wild </em>was featured in <em>Vogue</em> along with a photo that <a href="http://jezebel.com/5888072/did-vogue-photoshop-sugar">looked nothing like you</a>. You were Photoshopped to death. How did you feel about it?</strong></p>
<p class="bodytext">I was furious. I didn't get to see the picture until the magazine was on the stands. I was grateful that they ran an excerpt of my book, but I was so incredibly disappointed by what they did to the photograph of me. They came to Portland and did my hair and makeup, and frankly, I thought these would be the prettiest pictures ever taken of me. But what they did with Photoshop obliterated that. You can tell from everything I write that I'm an advocate for authenticity, so altering me to that degree was in direct opposition to everything I stand for professionally and personally.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">When e-mailing them before the photo shoot, I was very honest about my appearance. I told them I'm a size 12, I'm 43, and I've had two kids. I told them it'd be best if the clothes they chose for me weren't clingy in the middle because I carry my weight there, but that my legs and boobs are fine. This is the way I look and I wasn't going to go on some crash diet before <em>Vogue</em> photographed me. There's nothing wrong with my body, but they stretched me out and made me painfully thin, and my face looked like a waxen doll. But I learned from it. I will never again be photographed without having final approval of the photos before publication.</p>
<p class="QAscreenfeature"><strong>How did you find out about Oprah choosing <em>Wild</em> to bring back her book club? Do you feel ready for the level of success and scrutiny that an Oprah-level endorsement brings?</strong></p>
<p class="bodytext">One day, back in April, my cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number, but I answered it anyway. It was Oprah Winfrey. I recognized her voice immediately. She told me she'd read Wild and loved it and she wanted to restart her book club. I kept asking her if she was joking. She kept telling me she was dead serious. It was very, very exciting.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">I'm now even busier than before—it feels like the volume got turned up at a time when it was already pretty loud. Oprah's endorsement has brought more readers to Wild, people who might not have otherwise given it a second thought. I don't know if anyone is ever prepared for the intensity of the experience I've had over the past several months. I think you just ride the wave and see where it takes you.</p>
<p class="QAscreenfeature"><strong>It's sort of astonishing how many people write Sugar to talk about things they don't even discuss with their partners. Why do you think so many people have invested so much trust in you?</strong></p>
<p class="bodytext">When I was first starting the column, I thought it would be hard to do every week, so I thought I could take a week off here and there and pass the column off to a friend who could write under the name of "Splenda" or something while I was away. Very quickly I realized that would be a total betrayal because people were not just writing to anyone—they were writing to me. I'm touched by their trust and I know what a big responsibility it is. I get thousands of letters and I can't answer them all. Going through all of the e-mails is heartbreaking; sometimes I feel like falling to my knees and crying as I read about all the struggles and sorrows in people's lives. To those I can't personally respond to, I send out a silent "I hope you're okay." I think readers trust me because I speak to them with honesty and love. There's a fine line between honest and hurtful, and honest and <em>helpful</em>. As Sugar I'm very frank, but I'm also dispensing my sometimes harsh advice with genuine love and care. The Sugar column is a community. Even the comments section is loving and kind and encouraging. The Rumpus sees to that because it doesn't allow hateful or hurtful comments. Criticism is welcomed, but having disregard for others' feelings is not. Sugarland is a safe place. When you write me a letter you might get a spank, but you'll also get a pat on the head.&nbsp;</p>
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<p class="BodoniByline"><em>Tina Vasquez is a writer, editor, and college dropout from Los Angeles, California.</em></p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/article/sugar-rush#commentsBooksFeatureWed, 15 Aug 2012 22:21:20 +0000Kjerstin Johnson18353 at http://bitchmagazine.orgSealing the Dealhttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/sealing-the-deal
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The wet and wild world of selkie romance novels </div>
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<p>In 1972, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss published <em>The Flame and the Flower</em>. With this novel, Woodiwiss transformed the romance genre by making explicit what had previously been implied—that is, sex—and created a formula for success that romance authors would follow for decades. The archetypal romance plot of the post-Woodiwiss era goes like this: An innocent young woman experiences sexual awakening when she succumbs to an older, very powerful man, who in turn is domesticated—but not in any way emasculated!—by the aforementioned innocent young woman.</p>
<p>This formula may have inspired the pejorative "bodice ripper" and earned the genre the enduring scorn of literary critics and feminists, but it's also helped romance novels dominate bookselling: Indeed, the genre consistently outsells every other category in mainstream publishing, and in recent years it's proven itself recession-proof, continuing to grow even in a shrinking economy.</p>
<p>If you're not a reader of romance novels, your perception of—and, perhaps, disdain for—the genre is probably based on the above-articulated formula's assumptions about women, sexuality, and what constitutes true love. To be sure, there's plenty to hate about the variety that <em>The Flame and the Flower</em> pioneered. The characters tend to be thin, insipid copies of prototypes by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. (I am not alone in recognizing this: Scholars of the genre have long identified these 19th-century authors as the progenitors of modern romance fiction.) The typical heroine's naiveté—crucial to maintaining a creaky, contrived plot—manifests too often as the most exasperating kind of stupidity. And, worst of all, female sexuality is regularly exposited through rape as a plot device. As Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan write in <em>Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels</em>, the rape scenes endemic to romance plots "gave the heroines permission to explore their sexuality without appearing to be sluts."</p>
<p>The tacit acceptance of rape in romance novels written in the '70s, '80s, and into the '90s—and the tendency of their heroines to fall madly in love with their rapists—curbed my own flirtation with the genre. Curbed it, that is, until I was introduced to Virginia Kantra's sophisticated, folklore-infused paranormal romances and discovered how much the genre has changed since I last browsed the romance section.</p>
<p>There's no passionate clinch between small woman and looming man on the cover of Kantra's <em>Sea Witch</em>. There are no heaving bosoms, or any other kind of bosoms. There's simply a lone woman, rising from the ocean beneath a full moon. The novel's opening line is even more arresting: "If she didn't have sex with something soon, she would burst out of her skin." <em>Sea Witch</em>'s heroine, Margred, is a selkie—seal in the sea, exceptionally attractive human on land.</p>
<p>Folkloric kin to mermaids, selkies are found in storytelling traditions surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean and Norwegian Sea, in stories from Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Scholars recording oral traditions in these coastal regions during the 18th and 19th centuries found human/seal shape-shifters to be a well-established feature of folklore, with stories composed and shared by people who had daily contact with wildlife in general and seals in particular. (Indeed, "selkie" is simply the Orkney word for "seal.") Even into the 20th century, fishermen in Scotland and Ireland expressed the belief that seals—with their almost-human voices and expressive brown eyes—were not quite like other animals. Stories about selkies created a space for exploring affinity and difference in small, isolated communities, and for negotiating social phenomena that fell outside cultural norms. Tales of women who took selkie lovers provided, among other things, a way to talk about children born outside of marriage. The oft-told story of a man who takes a selkie bride by hiding her sealskin, only to lose her to the sea again when she regains her pelt, may have offered insight into both the appeal of the outsider and the loneliness of women married off and taken far from their own homes.</p>
<p >More recently, selkies have begun populating the subgenre of paranormal romance, which borrows elements from science fiction, fantasy, and horror—<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/91-9781428508705-0">Melanie Jackson's novel <em>The Selkie</em></a> came out in 2003, <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780758221797-3">Dawn Thompson's <em>Lord of the Deep</em></a> is from 2007, and <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780263880052-1">Anna Leonard's <em>The Hunted</em></a> was published in 2010. Kantra, however, is arguably the queen of selkie romance. Her Children of the Sea series (of which <em>Sea Witch</em> is the first installment) uses elements from two deeply formulaic and formally conservative narrative types—folklore and romance—to craft fiction that is smart, engaging, and original. Perhaps more important, she deploys these elements critically: Folklore not only gives her fiction depth and resonance, but it also provides her with a powerful tool for challenging many of romance's hoariest precepts.</p>
<p class="bodytextindent">Take Margred, who as <em>Sea Witch</em> opens is swimming toward the coast of Maine, yearning to "feel someone move inside her, deep inside her, hard and urgent inside her." Normally, romance is a vexing genre in that readers demand to read about their heroine having explicit, mutually orgasmic sex, but tend to bristle when that sex happens with anyone other than the novel's hero. Thus, the typical romance protagonist is inexperienced—or, at least, heretofore unsatisfied—when the story begins but capable of cosmic ecstasy upon her first coupling with her one true love. This aspect of the romance novel is changing, but romance fans seem reluctant to give up the relationship between a woman's sexual awakening and perfect, singular, monogamous, heterosexual love. Kantra elides this issue with her not-quite-human heroine—a seal can't be a slut, since we don't tend to judge the character of seals by their sexual histories.</p>
<p>Margred is both a gorgeous woman <em>and</em> an animal. She has, for example, no sense of humor, and she occasionally flashes her teeth in a way that is not at all friendly. More than anything, though, Kantra reminds us of her character's animal nature by making Margred a creature of almost feral sensuality. Beauty and the Beast become a single character, and this allows for some wonderful inversions of gender expectations. When Margred alights on that moonlit beach and meets Caleb Hunter, her hand is on his fly before they even exchange names. While it would be an overstatement to say that the duo present a perfect inversion of the typical dynamic between romance heroes and heroines, they come awfully close. In Margred, the animal has long been awakened, and Caleb doesn't offer her a sexual initiation; instead, he introduces her to such mundane phenomena as coffee, lobster rolls, and dishwashing.</p>
<p>Wendell, coauthor of <em>Beyond Heaving Bosoms</em>, suggests that the transformative aspect of the romance formula is usually some form of compromise: The heroine tames the hero or heals him; the hero elicits some reciprocal change in the heroine. And this is certainly true in <em>Sea Witch</em>: Caleb recovers from a disastrous marriage, while Margred discovers a type of union unknown to selkies. "But," Wendell writes, "while females as the sexual aggressors are becoming more common, they are not the norm, alas. Women are certainly found fully equipped with hornypants in romance novels, but to see them seek sexual congress indiscriminately such as in the beginning of [<em>Sea Witch</em>]…is somewhat more rare."</p>
<p>Paranormal romance abounds with otherworldly types, of course, with werewolves, were-jaguars, and—need I say it?—vampires. In an interview recounted in <em>Beyond Heaving Bosoms</em>, urban-fantasy author Lilith Saintcrow suggests that the threat of transformation that permeates so many paranormal novels could be a substitute for the loss-of-virginity trope in more traditional romances. When a male vampire or were-whatever turns the heroine into a creature like himself, he deflowers her. Even if she has previous sexual experience, even if she already knows how to wield a crossbow, she's still undergoing a potentially terrifying—and, in many cases, involuntary—initiation.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Already a supernatural creature, Margred isn't vulnerable to transformation in quite the same way a human heroine is. Nor does she pose a physical, existential threat to her human lovers; she cannot turn a man into a selkie. Still, the trauma of transformation is central to <em>Sea Witch</em>, as Margred's story is one of a supernatural being becoming human. Kantra channels the full resonance of her source material as she depicts Margred's efforts to adjust to life in a small, close-knit community, her attempt to reconcile her need for independence and her yearning for home with her growing love for a human man and her desire to be a part of his world. By novel's end, the reader is able to appreciate the complexity and gravity of Margred's ultimate choice. And, indeed, even the romance fan who knows that the ending is a foregone conclusion is likely to experience moments of real uncertainty.</p>
<p>In 2008's <em><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780425222973-0">Sea Fever</a></em>, the second book in the Children of the Sea series, and 2010's <em><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9780425237472-2">Immortal Sea</a></em>, Kantra presents human heroines who are just as interesting as Margred. <em>Sea Fever</em>'s Regina Barone is a chef and a single mom who is drawn into the realm of the erotic supernatural when she has what she thinks is just a one-night stand with a stranger. This stranger happens to be Caleb Hunter's long-lost brother, and it turns out that he's a selkie, one who will soon be embroiled in an elemental battle into which Regina will also be drawn. (Believe it or not, Kantra's plots are blessedly simple by the baroque standards of paranormal romance.) At the opening of <em>Immortal Sea</em>, Elizabeth Ramsey is 22 and looking for a little adventure before she starts medical school. She has an impulsive, explosive encounter with a magnetic man in black. Sixteen years later, she's a doctor, a widow, and a mother of two when that man enters her life again and reveals that he is one of the finfolk, another species of aquatic shape-shifter.</p>
<p>Both of these women are self-made professionals, devoted parents, and romantically experienced—they are, in short, honest-to-goodness adults. Regina and Elizabeth are aware of their own sexual and emotional needs, they have a sophisticated sense of the complex relationship between these two needs, and they are not shy about telling their lovers what they want. Elizabeth's ability to resist her attraction to a magical prince who has spent several centuries assured of his irresistibility adds a delicious—and affirming—tension to the plot. Safer sex is increasingly the norm in romance novels, but Kantra uses this commonplace both to underscore the power her human protagonist wields and to inject a little comedy into the narrative: The scene in which Elizabeth compels her immortal, godlike lover to wear a condom is kind of hilarious. Neither of Kantra's human heroines is as obviously transgressive as Margred, but the author is, once again, subtly expanding the romance genre by gently pushing against its conventions. The idea that women over the age of 30—women with some knowledge of the world and themselves—are suitable subjects for erotic escape is still a fairly new one in the realm of romance novels, and Kantra brings particular realism and subtlety to her lead characters.</p>
<p>Margred is a supernatural creature who finds her own humanity when she finds love. Regina and Elizabeth are women who rediscover passion with supernatural lovers. These scenarios are fantastic in their particulars, but the experiences these women have are versions of experiences that many readers will recognize: the contradictory desires for connection and independence; the emotionally fraught process of taking a lover without traumatizing the kids; the constant struggle to balance family, work, and romance. <em>Sea Witch</em>, <em>Sea Fever</em>, and <em>Immortal Sea</em> all provide readers with escape into a world where love conquers all, thus fulfilling the fundamental requirement of the romance novel. But, in her intelligent, nuanced use of traditional narratives, Kantra also creates mass-market fiction capable of performing some of the same cultural work as the folklore upon which she draws. That is, her novels generate an otherworldly place in which to explore real-world problems. All romance authors provide their readers with respite from their worries and dilemmas, but Kantra is exceptional in her willingness to fully engage with those worries and dilemmas. As she combines her considerable craft, a keen understanding of folklore, and an awareness of both the satisfactions and the possibilities of the romance formula, Kantra shows how far the genre has come since <em>The Flame and the Flower</em>, and offers hope for its ongoing evolution.</p>
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<em>Jessica Jernigan is a frequent contributor to </em>Bitch<em>, a graduate student in English, and the world's leading expert on selkies in paranormal romance—at least until another scholar takes an interest in the field.
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http://bitchmagazine.org/article/sealing-the-deal#commentsBooksOn The ShelfThu, 18 Aug 2011 16:27:02 +0000Kjerstin Johnson11994 at http://bitchmagazine.orgPink Sliphttp://bitchmagazine.org/article/pink-slip
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Breaking down the princess castle with Cinderella Ate My Daughter author Peggy Orenstein </div>
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<p>From the outside, Peggy Orenstein epitomizes feminist success. She's an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such distinguished publications as the <em>New Yorker, Elle, Vogue, Discover, Mother Jones, and O: The Oprah Magazine.</em> But her work itself is dedicated to asserting the ways in which "having it all"—or trying to—in a world built to the measure of men can have profound effects on women and girls.</p>
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<p><em>Illustration by <a href="http://www.myblankpaper.com/">Rebecca Green</a></em><a href="http://www.myblankpaper.com/"></a>
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From the outside, Peggy Orenstein epitomizes feminist success. She's an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such distinguished publications as the <em>New Yorker, Elle, Vogue, Discover, Mother Jones, and O: The Oprah Magazine.</em> But her work itself is dedicated to asserting the ways in which "having it all"—or trying to—in a world built to the measure of men can have profound effects on women and girls.
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<p>Orenstein's first book, the 1994 study <em>Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap</em>, explored the adolescent roots and gendered nature of the crippling self-doubt that plagues so many adult women. Her second, 2000's <em>Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, &amp; Life in a Half-Changed World</em>, examined the systemic biases and roadblocks women face in creating lives that balance personal and professional demands. And in 2007, Orenstein published a memoir, <em>Waiting for Daisy</em>, which recounted the challenges—infertility, cancer, and many more—she faced in becoming a mother. </p>
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Throughout her career, Orenstein has observed at close range how the media and popular culture have colluded to serve up distorted visions of womanhood to girls. And given everything she's seen, she'd be the first to say that being female in what's still a "half-changed world" is no fairy tale. So perhaps it's fitting that Orenstein's new book, <em>Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture</em>, takes on the Disneyfication of American girlhood, and the princess narratives sold hand over fist to girls like her own 7-year-old, Daisy Tomoko.
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<p>Disney princess narratives have long been a staple of modern girlhood. But <em>Cinderella Ate My Daughter</em> emphasizes that princess <em>culture</em> is a 21st-century phenomenon, the result of marketing executives seeking some consumer magic to boost the corporation's limp product sales. In 2001, the revenue generated by such Disney-branded princess paraphernalia as dolls, costumes, and room decor was about $300 million. Eight years later, that number had risen to a whopping $4 billion. Little girls are no longer consumers of Disneyfied fairy tales; in the new millennium, they have become the consumed.
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<p>And predatory marketing is only one of the problems inherent in princess culture, which Orenstein also believes is a major source—if not <em>the</em> major source—of the potentially harmful gender and race myths proffered to girls today. Even more insidiously, Disney princesses also prepare young girls to become consumers of a whole host of cultural products—from Bratz dolls to Miley Cyrus to toddler beauty pageants—that promote, and ultimately normalize, manipulatively sexualized girlhoods.
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<p>Orenstein's passion for her work as a "girl advocate" is evident not only in her writing, but also in how she talks about girlhood issues. She spoke to <em>Bitch</em> at length about what it means to be in the trenches of the commercial battle to capture the hearts and minds of young girls—and the dollars of those who care for and about them.
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<p><strong>How did the writing of <em>Cinderella Ate My Daughter</em> confirm or alter any of the ideas you had about "princess culture"?</strong>
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<p>When I went into it, I approached it in an exploratory way. We live in a time when girls are doing really well in a lot of realms. They're doing really well in school, they're going to college at a higher rate than boys, they're doing great on the sports field, they're in leadership roles. Yet, at the same time there's a resurgence—[or] more like just a "surgence"—of pink and pretty. Is this a positive thing that shows that we can now indulge girls in that without any kind of repercussions? Or is [it] an indication that girls are still being defined by how they look and urged to get their sense of self through external validation? I came out feeling that the latter was true. And it starts pretty much in infancy.
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<p>[The] insistence on defining girls and women by how we look and how we relate sexually is not only a way to keep [us] in our place, but a way we keep <em>ourselves</em> there. Obsessing over our appearance is the way we assure ourselves and others around us that even if we're really successful, we're not really threatening. [T]he pressures on women to look good from womb to tomb have become more intense and confusing [in part] because we have made so much progress. And the consequences for girls of being prematurely sexualized can be precisely the things we're trying to avoid, such as negative body image, eating disorders, or depression. One of the things [I found] that surprised me was the relationship between sexualization and disconnection from authentic sexuality: Girls who are sexualized early are more likely to see sexuality as a performance, not as something that they feel internally.
</p>
<p><strong>So it's like from the time girls are very young, they're always on stage somehow, whether culturally or socially.</strong> </p>
<p>
When girls play dolls today, the fantasy that's offered them is that they should grow up to be a rock star or movie star. That was absolutely not true when we were girls. And even the beloved Dora the Explorer—they split Dora into two because they wanted to keep the audience, and the audience was aging out younger and younger. So they made a tween Dora. [Original] Dora is very sturdy and just neutral: She has short hair, a straight-cut shirt, a backpack, and a map. [Tween Dora] got flirty clothes and pretty hair, and the map and backpack are gone. Her fantasies are about being a rock star performing a benefit concert. </p>
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So much of what girls are presented with is essentially about performance. [And] here's Dora, in this new incarnation, giving a soft-pedaled version of the same lesson. If it were in isolation, that might be one thing. But it's just constant. That's what girls are told [to aspire to]—high-school student by day, rock star by night. It's about the importance of this surface self. </p>
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<strong>It's a constructionist view of identity, taken to an extreme degree.</strong>
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<p>I've been thinking a lot more about the way girl power has been contorted into pro-narcissism. My daughter, Daisy, got a make-your-own messenger bag kit for her seventh birthday—[it's] a messenger bag that you decorate with iron-on transfers. [Most of] the transfers were pink and orange and purple, hearts and flowers and stars and all the stuff that you would typically expect. But that was not what we noticed. One of the transfers said "spoiled," another one said "pampered princess," and a third one said "brat." And [Daisy] looked at them and said, "Mom, why do they want you to put that on your purse? Isn't that kind of braggy?"—which is the worst thing you can say if you're seven. And I said, "Yeah, I think you're right. It is kind of braggy." Somehow the idea of creating a strong sense of self in girls has been distorted by the culture into announcing you're a spoiled, narcissistic brat—like that is what signifies confidence. But it's that sexualized, manipulative femininity.
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<p>If you asked what we want for our daughters, we'd want very wonderful, positive, thoughtful things: strong internal sense of self, self-direction and compassion and potential and all of that. And then [we] undercut that with what they're playing with. The two don't add up. </p>
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<strong>From what you say, it seems that well-meaning parents unwittingly cause split-identity problems in girls.</strong> </p>
<p>
And that well-meaning part is really key. I mean, when you walk into Pottery Barn Kids, it's like apartheid in there. For girls, it's hearts and flowers and hula girls—and the boys have sailboats, trucks, sports. I know somebody who was writing the [Pottery Barn] catalog, who said, "We've tried to make more gender-neutral items. And they just don't sell." We ended up with sea-creature sheets. So that was sort of neutral. [B]ut eventually your daughter may go, "Uh-uh. I don't want this." And if you keep disallowing it, giving her things from the boys' side of the store, she'll think you believe the stuff for girls is bad—and maybe even that being a girl is bad. And that's a problem, too.
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<p><strong>Could it be that there's just a cultural fear of exploring what it could be like to be female outside the bounds of narcissism?</strong>
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<p>There was some interesting research that I put in <em>Cinderella Ate My Daughter</em>, finding that the more egalitarian a society is, the more they believe that certain traits in men and women are innate—stereotypical traits, obviously. In the chapter "Pinked," I cite a study by a college professor who's been polling students on gender-related traits since the 1970s. And interestingly, over that time, the association of women with certain stereotypical traits—such as being talkative or friendly or indecisive—has increased. You could say that, "Well, now that we're more equal, we can see what's innate." Or you could say, "The closer we get to an egalitarian society, the more we fear we won't be different enough and won't be attractive to each other." Whatever the reason, it does seem that the more opportunities women get, the more simplistic we become in our thinking about each other's psychological makeup.
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<p>There's also the issue that if everyone skews more toward gender neutrality, or even if we allow for greater variation in each sex, you risk having boys who might seem "feminine," and everybody freaks out at that thought. It's that baseline homophobia. So that, I think, always keeps us in check.</p>
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<strong>You can't win, it seems.</strong>
</p>
<p>Well, I'm not ready to say that. I do think there needs to be more discussion of context, and more assumption that we—as parents or girl advocates or whatever—have control over some of this, that we have a say in it. There's a real incentive, of course, on the part of the people who are creating the culture to make us feel like we don't have control. That you really don't have a choice. But you do. </p>
<p>
I really do believe that change can be made on a micro level. You can think about it and make decisions about what you buy, what you expose your child to, how you talk about it—all that stuff. I think it makes a big difference. I mean, I know it does. My daughter was Athena on Halloween this year. That's a long way from Little Mermaid. One of the ways we countered the princess thing was to read a lot of Greek myths. She needs models of femininity and she needs to act out fantasies that affirm her as a girl. She hooked into Athena—that's a lot better than the alternatives. </p>
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<strong>So where do you think trends are moving now?</strong>
</p>
<p>I don't have a crystal ball. Who could have ever guessed what we would be contending with in terms of mass culture, like the Internet and social media? I mean, five years ago, you wouldn't have been able to predict all this, and we still don't know the impact of it. I wouldn't even venture to guess what the next generation will be dealing with. </p>
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<p>Cinderella Ate My Daughter <em>is on sale now at your local bookseller. M. M. Adjarian is a Dallas-based freelance writer. Her articles have appeared in SheWired.com, the </em>Dallas Voice<em>, and </em>Arts + Culture DFW<em>. She is also a book reviewer for </em>Kirkus Reviews <em>and</em> ForeWord Reviews<em>.</em></p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/article/pink-slip#commentsBooksColumnMon, 14 Feb 2011 19:17:13 +0000Kjerstin Johnson9033 at http://bitchmagazine.org